Domain of the Devil
When at length, Suresh was finding his moorings at Tihar; Subba Rau was brought in to a near stampede there. Why not, the whole nation knew him by then as the man who had pricked at the Premier’s face. When Suresh enquired what the fuss was all about, Rau said it was but a ‘literary coup’. Probed by Suresh for an account, Rau unfolded the story of his life and times as an unpublished writer.
In his mid-forties, Rau was seized with an urge to bring himself onto the fictional stage. So to lend scope for his boundless creativity, he chose the vastness of the ‘novel’ as the setting. And for the medium of expression, he bypassed his mother tongue, Telugu, the Italian of the East. Instead, he chose English not only for its ability to nuance the complexities of life but also for the flair of expression he had in it. Drawing from his examined life, he set out to portray a young woman’s life on the male canvas of India.
Ironically, it was his love for language that impeded the start, but soon enough he got his poetic prose right for the narrative in mind. With his creativity in command over the unique plot he conceived, he wrote with gusto and had his dream novel for his debut in nine months flat. After toiling for a while, for that ‘apart title’, he pitched in for ‘Tangent of Fate’. Then, with a top-of-the-world feeling, he dispatched the manuscript to a leading publisher in New Delhi. While he took the publisher for granted, he received his manuscript post-haste. And that made him see the irony of the title he had chosen for his novel!
This bolt from the blue shook Rau to the core, and he came to doubt his abilities as a novelist. Thus, holding the manuscript, as one would his dead child, he had a last look at it, as the father would, before the burial. But seeing it as crisp on its return as it was when he had posted it, he felt cheated. As he realized that none at the publisher’s end had an open mind, he saw the rejection letter all again. He felt sad at the ungracious averment of unsuitability on the designer letterhead.
Impulsively, he felt like resubmitting the manuscript with a rejoinder that the concerned editor could take her own time to read and reject it, if it were a must. But, on second thoughts, he realized that it would be treated as sour grapes, and thus kept his own counsel. Anyway, he tried his luck with other Delhi publishers, this time, all at a time. To his distress, it was like the quote of a cartel: Read your manuscript with interest but found it unsuitable for our publication.