Neelum Saran Gour in the city on Sunday. Picture by Sanjoy Chattopadhyaya

When bomb blasts ripped through Delhi three days before Diwali, Neelum Saran Gour was on the brink of a promotional tour for her fourth novel Sikandar Chowk Park. Watching the mangled dead bodies on TV, she couldn?t help but retrace the emotional journey undertaken for this book some years ago.

Sikandar Chowk Park rebuilds the lives of 11 people who perish in a fictive bomb blast in Allahabad, and Gour admits being ?very disturbed? when the explosions rocked Delhi.

?I can?t explain this disturbance. While writing the book, I had intensely experienced what the people may have experienced. While watching the blasts in Delhi, I felt like being actively involved intuitively and emotionally without being a participant,? says the English teacher at Allahabad University, in the city to promote the Penguin cover.

Gour, who divides her time between Allahabad and Calcutta, where her husband is stationed, had finished writing the book in 2000. A blast in New Jalpaiguri in 1999 had triggered off the thought process.

?I was trying to put myself in the situation the people were in? I am more concerned with the anonymous individual rather than the more visible people,? says the author, who admires the works of Vikram Seth and Rohinton Mistry.

Though an academic herself, Gour doesn?t prefer writing books that are ?heavy?. And her language in her recent release has more than a smattering of Urdu to give it a real feel of the place.

The narrator in Sikandar Chowk Park is a male journalist who pieces together the past of the 11 people and Gour is aware of the fact that she has been consciously ?non-feminist? in her attitude.

?I don?t call myself a woman writer and I have written more as a man than as a woman, because I have had a feminist father who never made me feel like a female,? smiles Gour. She admits being ?not a best-selling author? but one who is content with her ?small, steady and supportive readership?.

Promotional tour done, Gour plans to get back to her next, a novella on Mahatma Gandhi, where like Sikandar Chowk Park, fact merges with fiction with a finger on history.