Why I Write Romance

It is late at night. The house is quiet. My husband is asleep. My children are asleep. The dishes are done, the lunches are packed for tomorrow, the emails I didn't finish will wait until morning. This is the only hour that belongs entirely to me.

I open my laptop and I write.

I have been doing this for years. Stealing hours after long  days that belong to everyone else. Writing stories about love and desire and the complicated, beautiful, difficult work of choosing someone and being chosen. Writing the book I needed when I was young and couldn't find anywhere on the shelves.

What I find amusing — and occasionally still infuriating — is that this is almost exactly how it was when I was a young girl. Except then, I wasn't writing. I was reading. In secret. In the dark. Hoping no one would catch me.

***

I grew up in a home where romance novels were contraband.

They were not officially banned;  but we all understood — in the way that many things are understood in traditional South Asian households — what would happen to the expression on my mother's face if she found one under my pillow.

So I read them at my friend's house instead. She had shelves of them. Floor to ceiling, spine to spine, an entire library of stories about desire and longing and people who chose each other against the odds. I consumed these books  the way you consume something you are not supposed to have:quickly, gratefully, with one ear always listening for footsteps.

I got caught twice at home. Reading at night, flashlight under the covers, thinking I was invisible. The look on my parents' faces was not anger exactly. This is not part of our culture. This is not who we are.

I nodded. I understood. I kept reading.

What I could not say then —and  what I can say now, with enormous pleasure — is that they were factually incorrect.

Romance, desire, the full and unapologetic celebration of physical and emotional intimacy  are  perhaps the most ancient parts of our culture. We are the civilization that produced the Kamasutra — not as a scandalous text to be hidden but as a sacred one, a philosophical and artistic guide to maximizing pleasure, connection, and joy for all involved. We are the people whose temples are covered in carvings of human bodies in states of profound intimacy, placed deliberately at the middle level of the temple structure because the ancient architects understood that sexuality is not separate from spirituality. It is part of the ascent.

What happened to that culture? Centuries of rule by people whose religions were built on a very different relationship with the body. First the Mughals, then the British Raj, both arriving from traditions that conflated  shame and  sexuality with extraordinary efficiency. Hundreds of years of occupation will reshape a culture's relationship with its own body. The open, philosophical, celebratory approach to intimacy that produced the Kamasutra got buried under layers of colonial inheritance that we are still, generations later, trying to excavate ourselves from.

The result, in my childhood home, was a particular kind of silence. Sex was not discussed. It was not named. It did not exist in the space between parents and children, or between unmarried people of any kind. You arrived at your wedding night having been given absolutely no information, no framework, no language for what was about to happen or how to navigate it with another person.

And then —  I promise you this happened to me — the morning after your wedding night, virtually every woman in your family finds a reason to be in the same room as you, smiling with a particular kind of smile, asking how you slept, how the night was, wink wink nudge nudge, as if the silence of the previous twenty-something years had simply been a long pause before this moment.

The lingerie at the bridal shower. The whispered jokes. You're going to need this on your honeymoon. Laughter.Warmth.  The same women who would have confiscated my romance novels without hesitation.

***

The romance novels I read as a teenager taught me things my culture was not willing to teach me directly. Not just about the physical mechanics of intimacy — though yes, that too — but about desire as something to be understood rather than suppressed. About the interior life of women who wanted things. About the possibility of choosing your own partner based on something as radical as love and compatibility and the way someone makes you feel when they walk into a room.

Every marriage in my family had been arranged. And I watched those marriages carefully. The way children watch the adults around them for information about what their own future might look like. 

What I saw did not inspire confidence. Not because arranged marriages cannot work — they can, and many do; but I knew, with the certainty that only young people possess, that I did not want my parents to make this particular decision for me. If my marriage went wrong I wanted it to be my own fault. My own choice, my own consequence. Not something I could trace back to a biodata and a family meeting over chai.

The romance novels I read gave me a vocabulary for what I was looking for. Characters who chose each other. Who fought for each other. Who knew themselves well enough to recognize the right person when they appeared.

The problem was that none of those characters looked anything like me.

They did not represent my culture.

***

Years passed. I went to college. I got married — for love, my own choice, my own consequence. I had children. I built a career. I became the woman who packs the lunches and answers emails and keeps the household running and somewhere in the middle of all that, I stopped reading romance novels entirely.

Until one night, exhausted in the way that only working mothers might understand — the bone-deep, accumulated, years-long exhaustion of being everything to everyone — I picked one up again.

Late at night. House quiet. Everyone asleep.

I read the way I had read as a teenager. Hungrily. Gratefully. With the relief of someone who has finally found a few hours that belong only to them. 

And when I finished, I lay in the dark and thought: I still cannot see myself in this story. I still cannot find the character who knows what it is to navigate love inside my culture. Who understands that family is not an obstacle to romance but the very water it swims in. Who has sat through a three-hour wedding ceremony in Sanskrit, smiling and throwing things into the fire, with absolutely no idea what she was committing to — only to find  out, years later, when priests began translating the ceremonies into English, that she had made promises so profound and so beautiful that she wished someone had told her before she made them.

So, I started writing.

Just one scene at first. The very first chapter of Lucky Charm.

I had no idea it was a chapter then; no idea it was a novel; no idea it was a trilogy. I just wrote the scene that was most alive in my imagination and followed it wherever it wanted to go.

Three books later, here we are.

***

The readers who found my work in those early years came from all over the world. Women from cultures where family expectations shape every major decision. Where sex is not discussed but is somehow simultaneously everyone's business. Where love and duty and identity are so thoroughly braided together that you cannot pull one thread without disturbing all the others.

Many of them told me it was the first time they had read anything that reflected their actual lives. Some told me it was the first time they had encountered, in any form, an honest conversation about relationships and intimacy that didn't require them to pretend they lived somewhere else, in some other kind of family, with some other kind of history. Some told me they learned things from my stories that no one in their lives had ever been willing to say out loud.

That is why I write romance.

Not to escape — though there is nothing wrong with escape, and anyone who tells you otherwise has never needed one. Not just to entertain — though I hope with everything I have that these stories are entertaining, that they pull you in and keep you up past the hour when you should have gone to sleep.

I write romance because I believe that stories are among the few places where the very things  we are not supposed to talk about get discussed  anyway. Where the silence gets broken in the company of characters who feel like people you know. Where a woman who grew up in a home like mine, or a home like yours, can find herself on the page. Not despite her culture but because of it.

I write the novels I needed when I was young, hiding under the covers with a flashlight, learning about love from books that didn't  acknowledge I existed.

I know you exist.

This book is for you.