On the occasion of a book release…

My 10th book, a collection of twelve stories, ‘Gabhira Nidrare Iswar’ (God is in deep sleep) is released. All the stories of this book were published earlier in Odia literary magazines. Release of a new book always gives pleasure and I am happy.

No writer writing in Odia ever thinks even in his dreams to live on his writing. The person who publishes a literary magazine in Odia buys paper, pays to the printing press, hires one painter to design the cover and pays him. He gives a discount to the seller/hawker, pays for everything to publish and circulate the magazine. But he does not pay to the writer, though the magazine is sold only for the writings a magazine contains.

A publisher of Odia books behaves as if he would be showing a ‘favour’ to a writer to publish his book. His complaint is that Odia literature does not sell. They say they used to print one thousand copies of a book thirty years back. But now they print five hundred copies. If Government (Raja Ram Mohan Foundation) does not select the book to purchase, they do not know how many years it would take for the five hundred copies to be sold. Sometimes a writer feels humiliated to approach a publisher to publish his book.

Despite all these factors, the question arises, why I should write. Often this question is asked by an interviewer interviewing a writer for a magazine. Sometimes I also ask myself this question. In fact, I do not know exactly the answer to this question. But I know what happens to me if I do not write. If I cannot write for a fortnight or a month I feel restless and become irritable. Only writing calms me down and I become normal. I feel I may go mad if I cannot write.

Reaction over a story overwhelms me. I got a good many phone calls for a few months after the story Gabhira Nidrare Iswar was published in a magazine (Jhankar). The story was photocopied and distributed among the officers of the Department I worked for. My senior officer, when we met, asked me, “Whether your God is awake or He is still in sleep?” A woman after she had read my story ‘Pua’(Son) was so moved that she made phone calls to three-four persons to get my phone number, and telephoned me at about eleven in the night to say that the story had brought tears to her eyes. Many writers must have similar experiences. Perhaps, this is one of the factors that keep encouraging a writer to keep on his writing.

Twenty years back when I was working as a Treasury Office in a small town an engineer met me in my office and told that he had read one of my stories published in the literary page of a newspaper (Sambad). I had only published seven-eight stories by then. He said, “The story is good. I liked it. But it’s not great to write a good story, it’s great if one continues with writing good stories.” In course of discussion I came to know he read literature in four languages: Odia, English, Bengli and Hindi. He learnt Bengli and Hindi to enjoy reading books in those languages. He could be termed as a ‘voracious’ reader. To a budding writer like me he advised. “A writer should not take a reader for granted, should not write whatever he likes. A writer should remember a reader might have read Henry and Chekov, Maupassant and Maugham, Manoj Das and Surendra Mohanty. Why should he read you unless you write something new and different? Why a reader should buy your book and read wasting his money and time unless it interests him? Books of great authors are always available in the market and the reader has a choice. A writer should keep the reader in mind.”

I don’t know where the engineer is now. But I remember him before I despatch a story to a magazine for publication.
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