Pic by Gajanan Dudhalkar

She was once the high priestess of the Indian masala-filled bonkbuster. And now Shobhaa De is back with a ripping yarn after taking a prolonged 13-year break from the world of fiction writing. This time she’s making a comeback with an unpleasantly familiar cocktail of power-hungry politicians who’ll stop at absolutely nothing, ruthless businessmen wheeling and dealing for the next outsized deal and trigger-happy gangsters ready to make it all happen.

“Sethji had been residing in my head for a long time and refused to go away,” says Shobhaa De, about her latest novel named after Sethji, its larger-than-life, gonad scratching (a sure sign he’s thinking furiously) lead protagonist.

Sethji is the quintessential old-fashioned Indian politician cutting 21st century-sized deals. He’s a skilled wheeler-dealer, forever outsmarting wily rivals and simultaneously pulling the levers for multi-billion dollar road-building contracts. Says De: “I was trying to comment on what is going on and make the comment through fiction. It’s a strong way to get across the feeling that things are going so horribly wrong.”

It is 23 years since De scandalised the Indian literary world with her debut novel Socialite Evenings back in 1989 and it takes much more to shock today’s blasé reader. But De takes care to throw in loads of sex for her leading protagonists Sethji and his daughter-in-law Amrita — though there’s none for Amrita’s wimpy husband Srichand who has to be satisfied with perfecting his golf strokes and being adored by his pedigree dogs. “I’d like to win the Good Sex awards (for my writing)” laughs De.

It goes without saying that Sethji will trigger a flurry of speculation about who the novel’s characters are modelled on. Who are the two businessmen locked in deadly rivalry over a road-building contract? And who is Sethji himself? And there are no prizes for guessing who Bhau, the Maharashtra strongman is modelled on. Or, are they all composites? Inevitably, De’s not telling.

De’s favourite character, she admits, is Sethji’s sexy and super-smart daughter-in-law Amrita who turns into a pivotal figure as the story progresses. Says De: “Amrita inveigled herself into the story-line. It is almost a parallel story. She gets an equal amount of word-space and mind-space.”

When De turned 60 she announced her arrival into the sexy sixties soon afterward in typical fashion with a self-help book unabashedly called Shobhaa at Sixty. But it was never likely that De would slow down after hitting this numerical milestone.

Even today, the author of 17 books and countless newspaper articles settles down at the dining table the moment her husband and children have been sent off into the world each morning. And this is where she stays for the rest of the day with her laptop and piles of notes scattered around her. Says De: “I always write from the dining table. I sometimes wish I could travel with my dining table.”

De is amazingly prolific and she takes few breaks. She bashes out four regular newspaper columns every week and on top of that are sundry other pieces and books. If that’s not enough, there’s also a constant stream of twitter messages, a blog and even a diary that she has been writing since the age of 14. “I have almost a column a day to write. I prefer to get that out of the way in the morning. By lunch I’ve finished with my deadline work and on a good day I don’t want to stop even late at night.”

On a good day, she industriously churns out about 2,500-3,000 words a day. And on a bad day, perhaps 800. “It’s like training your voice. The more you write the better you get. It gives me sheer pleasure to write every single day.”If all that’s not enough, she has also teamed up with Penguin and is bringing out three books under what’s called the Shobhaa De Imprint. Says De: “These are books I’ve commissioned and I am handpicking authors and subjects that interest me.”

So, there’s one book scheduled on industrialist Adi Godrej and in a different vein, Kareena Kapoor’s style bible. Thirdly, on a more serious note, under the Shobhaa De Imprint there’ll be a how-to book on divorce by leading divorce lawyer Mrinalini Deshmukh that De says will also include “a wonderful pitch for not rushing to the courts.” In between, she makes time for a whirl of Page 3 parties and appearances on TV chat shows. De likes to call herself an ‘opinion shaper’. “It sounds nice,” she says.

Why did De abandon fiction for so long? “The journalist in me kicked in. There was so much cataclysmic change. I wanted to record it while it was happening.” She has done 10 non-fiction books on an astonishing variety of subjects from a current affairs volume, Superstar India, to Spouse: The Truth about Marriage and Surviving Men in which she tries to unravel the mysteries of the less mysterious sex.

Some of the books have been panned and the critics haven’t always been kind to her fast-paced, sex-laced novels. But De has the ultimate proof of her success as a writer. Her royalty payments are still pouring in even for her oldest books (most authors find sales drop to a dribble after the first few months on the stands). Also, both her fiction and non-fiction has been translated into 14 languages (including Russian, Polish and Korean) and she has travelled abroad for two international launches this year. Says De: “It’s wonderful to meet new readers with different mindsets.”

What comes next? In the fashion that’s become popular in both Bollywood and Hollywood, the book ends on a ‘to be continued’ note, making a sequel inevitable. Says De: “We are looking at a trilogy. Sethji is powerful enough to sustain that. We have attempted to explore the rot in the political system through him. Other sectors could also do with the same exploration.”

You could say that De began her career as a writer and journalist at a precociously young age. She says: “When I look at my diary and what I wrote at age 14 even then I was writing columns. I was not pouring out my heart. It was mainly observations on the changing contours of life around me.” Countless years later she’s still scribbling away furiously on an industrial scale.