‘I prefer a positive ending to unreal happily-ever-afters’

Nikita Singh, 30, wrote her first novel at 19. She was studying for her pharmacy degree, in Indore, at the time. “I realised… I’m expected to graduate, find a job, marry and have kids. I didn’t like the way my future was supposed to unfurl.” So she decided to change it.

She had always read a lot. “And I always knew that one day I would write a book. So I went to the library and I looked at all the books on the shelves, found out who the publishers were, then found their websites, and found their submission guidelines. Then I went to a cyber café, typed out my novel, which I had written in a notebook, and sent it out to the publishers,” she says.

Love @ Facebook (Pustak Mahal, 2011) is about a 19-year-old who falls in love with a VJ and up-andcoming actor, via Facebook. Singh, who works full-time as director of marketing for a solar energy company, has published a dozen books since. She avoids Western stereotypes in favour of greater relatability. “I have never written about the super-rich and billionaires. I write about relationships that look like my relationships or relationships of the people around me,” Singh says.

Her characters have passion but also career choices, family issues, deep personal struggles. In Like a Love Song (HarperCollins, 2016), a young woman quits college after a breakup, returns home, starts a business with a friend and eventually finds love. Every Time It Rains (HarperCollins, 2017) is about how trauma from the protagonist’s past affects her life, and love life. The Reason is You (HarperCollins, 2019) is about a young woman’s battle with depression and how this affects her love life. There’s a difference between a happy ending and a positive ending, Singh says, and she prefers the latter. “I do always leave my readers with hope.”

As for why romance writing in India is dominated by male writers, Singh believes this is because women aren’t allowed as much freedom of expression in general, let alone when it comes to something like writing about romance. “As a teen, the biggest thing that my parents did for me was to let me do what I was doing,” she adds. “I don’t think a lot of middle-class families in small-town India would allow their daughters to write about romance. Men don’t have these obstacles.”