Writer’s block is not something that author Ashok Banker ever worries about. With a touch of poetry, he says that words flow from him like a river in spate, liberating and revealing. So it’s no surprise that he has been writing roughly one book a year for the last two decades (though not all have been sent for publication). The reclusive author reflects, “Writing is my vocation, not my job. Leaves breathe. The tides turn. The earth revolves. I write.” And though he hasn’t even applied for a passport, he travels the world on the wings of his imagination.

Today, at 41, Banker has the weighty six-part Ramayana series behind him and has just finished writing The Seeds Of War, the first of the nine tomes on the Mahabharata (Penguin). But now he’s also preoccupied with his latest novel, Beautiful Ugly, a very personal account of his mother’s tumultuous life. His new project has raised eyebrows, because Sheila Ray D’Souza was today’s equivalent of a Page 3 regular. Model and socialite, she lived dangerously and was reportedly raped when Banker was an impressionable 12-year-old. Subsequently abandoned by her family, she died an alcoholic, completely destroyed, a mere 44-year-old.

Pegged as a sequel to his earlier autobiographical novels, Vertigo and Byculla Boy, Beautiful Ugly will also be adapted for a not-for-profit documentary project. Banker says evenly, “The purpose is to restore my mother’s name and reputation in a sort of tribute to her memory.” For the intrepid narrator of the 21st century, full-length Ramayana in modern English this novel will obviously exorcise some ghosts.

Meanwhile his Ramayana series has sold 1 million copies worldwide, lapped up by Indians and Indian expats. He says, “It took a while for people to understand that this is neither a Hindutva propaganda, nor is it an irreverent fantasy, but a tale that explores the fantastic elements and adventure of the Ramayana.”

What prompted Banker to reinterpret the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, one might ask. He says candidly that when he hit his mid-30s he began to reflect on his life and his career. “I felt I had gone astray from my original goals as a young boy, when I dreamed of writing massively ambitious historical novels.”

Looking back, he saw himself as an early achiever who stagnated as an adult. He began writing when all of nine. And by the time he was 14, he was being published regularly in newspapers, magazines and poetry journals. He’d penned three novels by 17 (fantasy books that combined sci-fi with Indian mythology) and had countless poems and short stories under his belt.

He had been interviewed on Doordarshan and All India Radio as a promising young Indian writer. His first collection of poems had been chosen for the ‘Young India’ section at an international book exhibition in Paris. Also, he had published his poetry in several prestigious international publications, and had even registered three separate magazines that he had intended to start publishing and editing himself!

He says with a tinge of sadness, “I grew up in Mumbai when it was Bombay, the child of a very traumatic broken home. Terrible things happened to me and my mother during the first 15 years of my life.”

Some of these have been documented in Vertigo and Byculla Boy (which were penned in his late 20s and early 30s). Writing became the only means of connection to the outside world, and he pursued it with a vengeance, determined to be a writer. Abandoned by their family at 15, Banker became his mother’s only means of financial and psychological support. And he found himself working for a living, doing odd jobs like conducting door-to-door surveys and writing columns. His dream of becoming a serious novelist had to take a backseat for the next 20 years, he rues.

“Then I found myself reviewing my life at past 35, and was despondent to find that I had only been doing hack-work and scripts for bad television serials. I was frustrated, overweight and unhappy as a person and a writer,” he says wryly.

So he went back to the stories that had first awakened his ambitions as a writer ? the tales of our Vedic age. And as a pure writing exercise, he says, he began retelling the stories as imaginatively as he could. Some were published abroad, as part of his Devi series of stories.

Around this time, Liz Williams, a visiting British novelist came to India and they were introduced by a mutual friend. At the time Banker was toying with the idea of writing accounts of India’s history and its mythology in a series of 50 books. Williams asked Banker to send her what would be the first book in the series. “What better way to start the story of India than with the first Indian ‘book’ itself ? the Ramayana,” he says. He gave her a section of the Ramayana he’d been rewriting in his “own idiosyncratic manner”. She loved it, and sold it to publishers in USA, UK, Germany and France.

And no, it wasn’t a scary thought to retell the age-old story so close to Indian hearts. His research had proved that there were as many Ramayanas as Ram-bhakts in the world. “Each one can take his or her own interpretation of the story, and it would still be valid,” he explains. The Ramayana took six years to complete though his research had begun as a young student and had continued throughout his life.

Those who enjoyed his earlier books will be happy that by end-2006 they’ll be able to pick up the first of the Mahabharata series, The Seeds Of War. The second Mahabharata book, As The Blind King Watched, will be penned after Beautiful Ugly and the film based on it are released next year. Even as he finalises his cast for Beautiful Ugly, Banker is busy resurrecting the original manuscript of Byculla Boy, a novel that was pared down from 900 pages to a 250-pager by Penguin. Banker hopes that this yet untitled novel will also see the light of day by next year.

With so much on his plate Banker will perhaps drop out of sight yet again. “Most of my waking hours are spent reading, researching and writing. Living my life is more important to me than talking about it,” he says by way of explanation. He may be doing the vanishing act often, but he doesn’t abandon his readers. He is in touch with as many as 5,000 Ramayana readers from around the world, via email.

He likes to describe himself as a socialist rather than a socialite. He believes in keeping touch with everyday reality ? going to the market, trundling to the gym, meeting friends, spending time with his family ? his wife, Bithika, son, Ayush, 16 and daughter Yashka, 12 ? and making his own chai as he writes.

And he’s back in his shell now, doing what he loves best: writing. “If I wanted fame, I’d have accepted the modelling or film offers that I used to get so regularly as a teenager. The only real thing is the pleasure of creation. The joy of inventing something that has never existed before.”

Photograph by Gajanan Dudhalkar