View From the Top

The chatter bubble grows bigger,this time aided by the report that Tiger Hills has bagged the highest advance ever paid by Penguin India to a debut novel. The 30-something Mandanna,a former New York-based equity professional who will soon be shifting to Toronto,confirms it,mock shuddering at the “dreaded advance question”. Some of the figures quoted in the media are quite fantastic,she points out,though she is unwilling to name the actual figure. It is quite by chance,she says,that her manuscript had landed on the desk of David Godwin,a literary agent of formidable repute. “An agent of repute is a stamp of credibility given the sheer volume of submissions to publishers. If you are unrepresented,your manuscript is likely to end up in the ‘slush pile’,the graveyard of orphaned,unmarked manuscripts,” she says.

Shorn of all the spin,Tiger Hills is a tale of love and passion played out in the hauntingly picturesque vales of Coorg,its protagonists proud,handsome and doomed. “The book,written over five years in New York,is based on the memories of the summer vacations spent at Coorg as a child,surrounded by grandparents,uncles,aunts and cousins,” she says. And so there are descriptions of vast expanses of paddy fields and the enchanting aroma of cardamom forests,of people whose lives play out between tiger weddings and river goddess festivals,a land walked by virile hunters and jasmine-plaited,kohl-eyed native beauties—a ground perhaps to suggest a use of visual exoticism to wow the West? “I never thought of it that way,” said she,adding that Coorg had to be the backdrop,generations of her family having lived there. “Even if stripped off that canvas,the story is universal,” she signs off.