In India in the 1960s and 70s Charles Dickens was one of the best loved novelists in English for school children like me. Thomas Hardy was popular and so were Jane Austen and George Eliot, but these did not match up to Dickens then. We loved his sentimental situations, his humour and his pathos that he drove home with the help of his exaggeration. His crime worlds and his mysteries blended well for the young mind in search of classics.

When I began to write The Tailor’s Needle, I had no idea that Dickens would guide me on at the subconscious level. I was all the time trying to measure up to his novels and his style without quite knowing it, and that when Dickens had now been reduced to just a name in my life. I never ever discussed him or his art, nor did I think of him.

Some of my characters became Dickensian, then some situations followed suit and when I reached the middle of my novel, I was suddenly gripped by the fear that the novel may have become uninteresting for the reader. I then thought of Dickens’s Bleak House which became a murder mystery somewhere in the middle even though it began as a simple literary novel. Even Great Expectations had this sense of mystery running through it. This helped me to decide what I was to do. I changed Part II of The Tailor’s Needle, making it a murder mystery with the backing of Dickens behind me. The strategy worked and this novel was first published in the UK and then in India by Penguin. Thank you Charles Dickens!

Now I know how many Indian novelists writing now have consciously or unconsciously imbibed from Dickens – R. K. Narayan, Mulk Raj Anand, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, Manu Joseph, Vikram Chandra, and others.