ARTFUL SHIFT: (From top) Envoys Vikas Swarup, Pavan Varma and Navtej Sarna have all taken to writing

On a humorous note, Vikas Swarup remembers that day in 2007 when he hopped on to a flight that was to take him from Durban to Johannesburg. “The passenger sitting next to me asked me who I was,” says Swarup, author of the critically-acclaimed bestseller Q & A, which took the literary world by storm after being published in 2005. “I told him I was India’s Deputy High Commissioner to South Africa.” Later, much to his surprise, the passenger took out Swarup’s book and began reading it. “Have you read this book,” he casually asked, turning to Swarup. “I wrote it,” the envoy deadpanned. The man who refused to believe him was convinced when he saw Swarup’s picture on the inside cover.

Call it professional bracketing, but literary endeavours are not what the world associates diplomats with. “Sometimes, people just can’t conceive of a diplomat as a fiction writer,” contends Swarup. But that’s just about where all presumptions end. For Indian envoys, contrary to popular belief, are now wielding a mean pen when it comes to churning out books that are storming the minds of readers around the world.

Earlier, many diplomats waited till they retired before they penned their thoughts, and those were mostly semi-academic books on foreign affairs. But now, serving officers are paying homage to the muse of words and imagination.

Come July 28, and Six Suspects, Swarup’s second novel, is all set to hit Indian bookstores. A few months ago, retired Indian Foreign Service (IFS) officer Kiran Doshi released his second fictional endeavour, Diplomatic Tales, written in comic verse, and has already begun work on his third novel. Pavan Varma, director general of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations with a train of published works to his credit, is nearly 70,000 words through his next project, which attempts to analyse the culture of post-colonial societies.

And that’s not mentioning T.S. Tirumurti, joint secretary at the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA), whose 2001 fiction debut, Clive Avenue, won over critics and who’s now at the writing desk again, penning a novel tentatively called The Gecko Chirps but Once. Besides, who’d forget We Weren't Lovers Like That, written in 2003 by Navtej Sarna, MEA spokesperson, and the lyrical 2004 collection of poems called Rain Rising by Nirupama Rao, Indian ambassador to Beijing.

Clearly, Indian diplomats-turned-authors are finding their place under the sun. And there’s no denying the high marks that each of their manuscripts meet. Hear it from Jane Lawson, editorial director at Doubleday, Swarup’s publisher. “Vikas contrives to combine masterful storytelling with big social issues of the day,” says Lawson of the new book, a strand of which is inspired by the Jessica Lall murder case. “He creates big, memorable, quite absurd and often theatrical characters that hook the readers’ emotions.”

But what prompts one envoy after another to pick up the pen and embark on a literary flight of fancy? Someone once argued that there was a Stephanian school of literature, hypothesised on the fact that several former students of St Stephen’s College, Delhi, had gone on to become prominent writers. Is a South Block school of literature, then, also in the making?

Mention that to Tirumurti, and he’s the first one to jump to his peers’ defence. “The first common allegation is that diplomats write because they have nothing else to do,” he says, bursting into laughter in his South Block office. “But ironically, it’s the severe pressure of diplomatic assignments that actually makes us write.”

It’s a nice way to ease out the tension at work, he says, even if it means clogging one’s daily schedule even further. “Most of my writing happened when I was first heading our office in Gaza and then in the foreign secretary’s office in Delhi. Writing helped me preserve my sanity through the busiest phases of my career, when I was working 12 hours a day, seven days a week,” he admits.

Varma, who many see as the literary mentor within the IFS writers’ bloc, agrees. “I write in the crevices of day,” says Varma. “But writing allows me an escape vent from the orderly diplomatic world into a world that is intensely personal.”

Doshi would only second that, though in jest. “Diplomatic life is strenuous, and the stints in South Block, even though mercifully distant from cocktail parties, can be murder! But life abroad also prepares you for the job of writing, because writing dispatches is terribly important in the IFS, that’s how you keep reminding the fellows back home that you are still around!” he jokes.

On a serious note, though, diplomats do acknowledge the sense of space, distance and objectivity that foreign postings come with, all ingredients for a loner’s activity like writing. “More importantly, since we exist within a closed group, it’s easy to lapse into golf, bridge and mindless speculations about future postings and promotions, if one doesn’t take advantage of these factors to pursue other interests,” says Varma. “As a person with a sustained literary graph among IFS personnel, it has now almost become my job to encourage closet writers and pull them out into the open,” he laughs.

It also comes as no surprise, then, that apart from writing, many of these diplomats wear different caps. If Rao is known for dabbling in classical music, theatre and singing, Tirumurti is a veena player and has a quirky collection of autographed sketches from people such as the Dalai Lama, Yasser Arafat and Hosni Mubarak. On the other hand, Rakesh Sood, former Indian envoy to Afghanistan, wields a camera, and recently held a photographic exhibition titled Footloose in Afghanistan, the result of his sojourns in former Taliban land.

And while most IFS types have refrained from writing about work (if only to get away from it!), some diplomats have simply not been able to resist the temptation of writing novels which bring to light the humorous aspect of being an IFS officer. Varma plans to write his own memoirs post-retirement, which he intends to call A Reason to Laugh. And Doshi’s 1999 debut, Birds of Passage, is about nothing but the IFS and its ways, in which most incidents were based on real incidents.

Ask him why he chose the IFS as his topic, and Doshi recalls a meeting with cartoonist R.K. Laxman, which he says led him to first flex his writing muscles. “I asked him how he got the ideas for his cartoons, and Laxman said he had a whole department working for him. ‘It is called,’ he said, poker-faced, ‘the Government of India’,” recalls Doshi. “That’s when I felt I was better placed than Laxman. I was actually in the government!”

At the end of the day, though, many diplomats say that juggling work with writing is very demanding. “One evening, your brain may be bubbling with ideas for the novel you are writing, but you have to first contend with attending the reception to celebrate the national day of some country,” says Swarup. Certainly, compromises have to be made. And more often than not, the writing suffers as no diplomat is ready to take time out of work for literary pursuits.

“Our job is exacting and comes before our personal interests, we simply have to give it 100 per cent,” reasons Tirumurti. “Besides, it’s a job we really love. So switching from one to another can be demanding, especially when you return home at 9 pm and have to force yourself to stay up for another two hours, only to write. The country’s interests always come first. We can’t afford to let people down.”

Thankfully, the government of India hasn’t complained yet. The readers neither.