HOMECOMING: Clare Somerville of Harlequin Mills & Boon in town on Tuesday. (Anindya Shankar Ray) LOVE ALL: A Mills and Boon romance

Love may be independent of real life in the books, but marriage takes its toll on romance outside them, admit the publishers of Mills & Boon. They suspect it happens most in India.

According to market research carried out by the most well-known brand of romantic fiction, which started its India operations in 2008, the reader group that it targets in the Indian market is the single, working woman in her 20s. She has money and she is ready to indulge herself.

But she goes off the hook once she is married, for about five years. “There’s a hiatus,” says Clare Somerville, general manager, India and UK sales, Harlequin Mills & Boon. “The break is peculiar to India. After that the reader returns.”

Maybe the young married woman finds true love lasts for five years. Or maybe she finds in-laws. But after sometime, it’s back to a Greek holiday in the arms of the tall, dark, handsome man. Mills & Boon books have always allowed escape at the darkest hour. Their sales soared during the Great Depression, when the publishers focused their business on romance, and also during the recent Recession.

LOVE ALL: A Mills and Boon romance

Not that schoolgirls in India don’t read Mills & Boon any more. And M&Bs are still called The Reluctant Surrender (in the flagship “Modern” category). And Charles looks at Dominique lying on his bed, and she looks back at him with eyes as big and blue as the sky, locked onto his, their expression beseeching. Some things don’t change.

But previously a schoolgirl could pick up a Mills & Boon from a lending library. Now that lending libraries seem to have disappeared, the books are sold, at Rs 99 apiece.

That hasn’t done any harm to the sales of the books in India. Somerville was in town to speak about that. “In the last two years, sales have doubled,” adds Manish Singh, country manager.

The Indian market, one of the biggest for M&Bs, is getting special attention from the publishers of the books that are read in over 100 countries and 30 languages.

Two Indian heroes have appeared already in the books, and soon there will be one written by an Indian author, Milan Vohra, featuring an Indian hero and a heroine, “a guru and a shishya”.

The book will be launched sometime next year, says Somerville, who was born in Calcutta. Her British father had met her American mother at Tollygunge Club and her mother had walked off in a huff befitting an M&B heroine. They got married soon after.

Today Somerville looked up her Ballygunge Circular Road house. She had left the city when she was three. The city has changed immensely in these years.

Somerville speaks about the fundamental changes M&Bs have undergone. The heroine was less dominating before. Now she has the man “on her own terms”. She is a professional. Her relationship with the man is consensual; he doesn’t always pounce on her like a predator, breathing heavily, yet making her swoon in a heap of joy.

While she remains English-speaking, the hero, at his most exotic — as in the animal world, in an M&B, the male always has the privilege to be more exotic — has morphed beyond being Australian or Latino, and become, if not an Indian, a Sheikh.

The Sheikh as a hero is firmly placed in this world. One guesses why it has easy for him. He was always a billionaire and good-looking.

Given the popularity of paranormal romance, Mills and Boon heroes have evolved in that direction too. Some of them are vampires.

But whether Indian, Arab or fanged, they continue to be irresistible and sexy and embody the universal truth: that women love to love a man who is good and it doesn’t hurt if he is good-looking and rich too, for there are not many of them in real life. Her craving for him is eternal.