Originally posted by: sashashyam
Dear Laurie,
I had just got my take on your Chapter 9 all typed out and now I see that you have put out the next chapter as well! You wicked girl, you are is such haste to get your Adonis all signed, sealed and delivered into your keeping that you have written yourself into Chapter 10 already? Nice going, kiddo.
As for the peaches and the hints perceived there by others, I would prefer to wait and see what you actually make of that teaser. Unless of course it is the red herring that I escaped the last time!
See below for what I had wanted to send you in praise of your 9th.
Shyamala
Dear Laurie,
The gentle sound of thumping that you might be hearing is me patting myself on the back. That is for having successfully solved at least one of the innumerable little question marks and puzzles that are scattered lavishly across the pages of The Raging Storm: to wit the meaning of Manav's smile when Karan shows him the slip of paper with the address at which he and his team will be staying in London.
You might remember that Janhvi had posed this question, and my reply was "I think the address is that of the same building in which Arjun has his bachelor pad. You would remember that his flat too was a duplex, and he had to go downstairs from his bedroom level to open the door to DK and Manav.
This alone is of course far from conclusive, as there must be any number of such residential buildings in London. However, the fact that Manav recognises the address, and that, Manav not being a resident of London, there would not be too many addresses to which he would react in this fashion, would seem to point to this solution."
I had of course taken out some insurance against your propensity for mischief and leading people up garden paths using red herrings, but it seems that it was not needed this time. Well, it is nice to be correct for once, for I do not expect to be as lucky many more times!
Nor, unlike so many of our impatient fellow forum members, am I at all eager to have Arjun meet Purvi in your next chapter, or even the one after that. I prefer a slow, lingering, delicate build up to a denouement that I am sure you will manage to make very, very special. It is really far more enjoyable to savour the tang of anticipation, rather like the bouquet of a rare vintage, secure in the fore-knowledge that it will happen, than to rush headlong into an over-hasty fulfillment, and then what?
It seems that our understandably eager friends, who are breathlessly on the lookout for the pair to finally get together in reality (and not just on Arthurian beaches under 'screaming' skies), do not take into account the eternal dilemma of the CVs, which also holds good for you infinitely superior tale: if you move too fast, in order to please your public, you will end up with an all too quick happy ending. Then the very same public will pelt you with (virtual) rotten eggs and tomatoes because of the withdrawal pains they will suffer from after such an early end to the tale. I am firmly on your side in this as in all else, and you should be left free to move your chess(wo)men at your own pace, as the spirit takes you.
As for your Chapter 9, right from the very clever title that took me back to childhood memories of Enid Blyton's The Magic Faraway Tree, everything was smooth as silk and light as air. Just as it should have been, to lighten the crackling intensity of the beach scene in Chapter 8 and what followed. One cannot live in a state of high tension all the time, like a sitar string stretched to breaking point, and this cheerful interlude struck just the right, uplifting chord. And this without abandoning the underlying note of telepathic obsession ' the light, magic breezes of the heart that exist nowhere else ' that is like a recurrent marker in this tale of love beyond reason.
As for your next, I shall bide my time in patience, even though you tell me that, mentally, you are already in chapter 21. A most reassuring thought, not just because you have all that material ready, but more because I am now sure that there will be at least 21 chapters. I always had a weakness for large tomes with long stories, to satisfy a literary appetite as gargantuan as mine.
Shyamala
Book Talk
Anupamaa
Vasudha
