SHOBHAA DE

She's delighted readers with her writing for over 50 years, and continues to do so with elan. Shobhaa Dé is back with her latest, a memoir of an important year leading up to a milestone birthday... her 75th! The author gets candid with Shraddha Kamdar on Insatiable

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Her most favourite possession is a plastic desk calendar, one which she can’t live without. It’s one that author Shobhaa Dé fishes out from among other possessions on her table when I visit her. The prolific writer turned 75 this year, and celebrated the milestone birthday in many ways, one of them her latest book, a memoir, Insatiable – My Hunger For Life (HarperCollins).

“My entire life is tabulated on the leaves of such calendars… If I’ve not created an entry, then, sorry, it does not exist, whatever it is,” she writes in the book. Drawing inspiration from this item that her life depends on, she came up with the format of the book. “Nobody is really interested in a lowdown of 75 years!” she avers. “Attention spans being what they are today, I wanted a fresh way of looking at this memoir, considering I did one at 50 and one at 60.” That’s how the book was planned, with 12 chapters, each dedicated to a month of the year, and written in real time – leading up to this milestone birthday. It covers the gamut – Mr Dé, as she fondly calls her husband, the brood (her four children) and many friends, and her trusted helper Pushpa.

With almost every instance having a mention of Pushpa, her brood surely feels she is the heroine of the book, since they themselves only seem to trip in and out of Shobhaa’s life. Of course, she could not resist using Rajesh Khanna’s legendary “Pushpa I hate tears”