What does a novelist need? Older readers might imagine typewriters and goose quills, but those are so obsolete — very few writers today know how to spellcheck without software. Those of you who think yourself young, may believe that all it takes is a Twitter handle, but tweeting isn’t, strictly speaking, the same as literary success.
For an author to make a living, the five most useful tools are the following: brain, eyes, hands, beer and laptop. Of the five, the three first usually come bundled with the package we get when we are born. Beer in Bengaluru is ₹60 a ‘pintu’, so even when there’s no royalty cheque in the mail, one can afford the inspirational cool drink.
That leaves us with the matter of the laptop, which is something that tends to be more expensive than beer, and according to my experience, must be replaced between books, because the constant editing and rewriting gives the keyboard a battering that eventually leaves it dead.
Luckily enough, since Bengaluru is India’s undisputed IT capital, there is, of course, a bazaar dedicated to computers, and everything related to them. Going there is like reading a techie magazine in 3D and real-time, as prices change from moment to moment, when new products are launched and offered at promo rates, or old batches are cleared out.
There’s no room for nostalgia in SP Road, because you can’t go back the next day and say, ‘Hey boss, yesterday you offered me this lappie for 18K’. That laptop will be gone, and so the moment you see it, you grab it.
If it hadn’t been for SP Road, being a novelist wouldn’t be a viable job. So inevitably, after the launch of a book and before starting work on the next manuscript, I take the bus to Town Hall and brave the manic traffic swirling around Hudson Memorial Church, like masala ingredients in a household mixie. Crossing JC Road, which roughly marks the point where the ancient city wall stood, I’m in the medieval heart of Bengaluru, walking streets laid out during the time Michelangelo was doing all those handsome paintings in the cathedrals of Rome.
For a storyteller, these old bazaars are a great inspiration. I find myself wondering who Sadar Patrappa, after whom my favourite bazaar is named, might have been, and if he, in his lifetime, anticipated that his initials would become synonymous with affordable laptops.
The electronics are clustered around the eastern end, just as one enters the area, but digging deeper into the bazaar, one finds shops devoted to construction hardware. Apparently, that’s how it started: SP Road was always the place for mechanical stuff, until new generations of shopkeepers diversified into electronics in the 1970s.
So by and large, SP Road follows the ancient business methods of bazaars, but there is very little medieval shopping left, because the hi-tech products belong firmly to the 21st Century: discount packs of 100 DVDs, all manner of electronic spare parts and other thingamajigs, locally-made cartridges that are dicey and may ruin the printer, but on the other hand they do it cheaply.
The Samsung, on which my novel Mr Majestic! was written, cost me about ₹15K here, while Hari: A Hero for Hire was written on a ₹20K HP, so I’ll probably have to cough up ₹25K for my next laptop — but it is worth it, as I feel that my SP Road ritual of buying a fresh laptop inevitably means that a new book will have to be born as a result.
So to answer the question we started with, what a novelist really needs is actually just one good street.
(Zac O’Yeah is the author of popular comic thrillers Hari: A Hero for Hire, Mr Majestic! and Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan, plus 10 other books )
