Pic by Rupinder Sharma

Namita Gokhale never dreamt that she’d write a sequel to Paro: Dreams of Passion — her chartbusting debut novel that had her readers gawking with its in-your-face sexual humour. The novel, written when she was just 28, had been a pathbreaker for that era.

“It stood the test of time and I had left it behind,’’ she shrugs. But then a close journalist friend bluntly told her that Paro... was the best of all her books and asked why she didn’t go back to it? The idea lingered in the recesses of Gokhale’s mind.

Eight months later, she was on a long flight from South Africa to Delhi when she had a Suddenly Something moment. It was Priya again — the slightly detached, voyeuristic, the antidote-of-Paro narrator of her first book — who spoke to her.

“I discovered that Priya was now in her 50s and — like me — was coping with menopause, ageing and a world that was changing,’’ she says.

So, Gokhale’s newest novel Priya In Incredible Indyaa (Penguin) — the sequel to Paro... — resurrects some of the characters from her first book. Paro... told a young woman’s tale of upper-middle class Delhi and Mumbai, replete with social climbing, adultery and decadence. At a slightly different level, Priya... is a social comedy that relocates some of the same characters in Delhi's elitist society.

Paro is dead but there’s B.R., Priya’s one-time boss and occasional lover, and Suresh, Priya’s staid lawyer-turned-politician husband. There’s also Lenin, her radical friend. Priya now has a glamorous new friend, Pooonam — the three Os have everything to do with India’s penchant for adding extra alphabets to names for good luck – who’s in hot pursuit of money, sex and Jimmy Choo shoes. Priya, the secretary of ‘Paro’, is now the wife of a junior minister and on the fringes of Delhi’s power elite.

“The book is a mirror of our times. If Paro... was the first triumphant chicklit of those days, then Priya... must be the first haglit!’’ says Gokhale smiling.

Given that Gokhale is hugely busy, as an organiser of several literary festivals, she has often had to put her books on hold for months. Priya was written in “bits and pieces” over three years.

Soon after returning from the International Literary Book Festival in Bhutan of which she is co-director, she immediately got into the thick of promoting Priya.... She’s also involved in a host of other literary festivals — the literary festival in Kathmandu as well as the Doon Readings in Dehradun which features recitations by poets and singers from across Uttarakhand.

In addition, when she gets a breather, she’s going to plunge into another mammoth project (she calls it an ‘adventure’) Indian Literature Abroad (ILA) in collaboration with the culture ministry. She’ll be organising the translation of works from the 24 Indian languages into the six Unesco languages and promoting them abroad.

And of course she’ll soon slip into the frenetic preparations for the 2012 Jaipur Literature Festival. The festival, which is now into its sixth year, occupies a large chunk of her life, she says. As its co-director along with author William Dalrymple, Gokhale’s life shuts down to other things come October and she resurfaces only by February.

Through the rest of the year too she’s in constant touch with Dalrymple, working on the next Jaipur jamboree. “We represent different interests and views. We agree on a lot and fight quite a lot too. And in the years we don’t fight, we worry,” she says.

Pix: Rupinder Sharma

But despite her busy life, at 55, Gokhale has authored six novels and several non-fiction works. She also plays publisher with Yatra Books which has co-published 250 regional language books in the last five years in collaboration with Penguin.

Currently, she’s also very pleased by the fact that she’s going to be a grandmother soon as her younger daughter, Shivani, is having a baby. “Both my daughters and sons-in-law are awesomely bright. I’m hugely intimidated by them all,” she laughs. Her elder daughter, Meru, is a senior editor at Penguin India who is based in UK and is married to author Patrick French while Shivani, is also into publishing.

Gokhale is from a closely-knit family which stood by her through all the stressful times, especially when she lost her husband. Her mother is a pillar of her strength. The Book of Shadows (1999) was written when she was struggling to cope with her husband’s loss. She describes it as “my best book yet”.

Married at 18 (when she was in her final year at college), Gokhale was always into studying Indian writers. Though she couldn’t graduate (she got into controversy with her college over her choice of papers and wasn’t given a degree), she went on to publish and edit a film magazine, Super, in the late ’70s.

And then Paro... happened and her journey as author began. Her other well-known books include Gods, Graves and Grandmother (1994), A Himalayan Love Story (1996), The Book of Shiva (2000) and Shakuntala (2005).

She’s written some short stories and may spend the year writing a few more, or she may go back to finishing a book that she had begun writing seven years ago but gave up on after 50,000 words. The Things to Leave Behind, is a family saga spanning a few generations set in Kumaon. “The canvas was bigger than I could handle,” she says.

But she may complete it just yet: “I’m not afraid to bet against the odds.”