The Wrong Turn by Namita Roy Ghose

Just to bring you up to speed, my first novel The Wrong Turn, a sweeping saga set in the time of Netaji Subhash Bose and the tragic Battle of Kohima, was launched on February 28. Vidya Balan did the honors, with Rajat Kapoor and Simone Singh joining in to read from the book followed by a very stimulating discussion between Anil Dharker, Tigmanshu Dhulia, Arshad Warsi, Tisca Chopra and the authors on themes ranging from betrayal to what are the liberties that fiction can take with history. The book has got rather flattering reviews, with Jug Suraiya calling it “A thundering good yarn” and Shekhar Gupta saying it was “Gripping reading.” So how did I, ex-Creative Director of HTA [JWT], and full-time ad film director, running White Light [yes, that White Light], end up writing a historical novel, a big 488-page thumper on the Azad Hind Fauz  and a largely forgotten battle in the last days of WW2 with generous dollops of love, betrayal, blood and derring-do thrown into the cauldron?

Well, like all good things in life, many bits and pieces sort of came together. Being Bong, I have grown up on the lore and legend of Netaji and the mysteries and silence surrounding him and the ill fated battle he and his men fought and lost, inexplicably. For me, it was a story waiting to be told. Then along came an article in 2013 about how the National War Museum in UK had declared the Battle of Kohima the greatest battle ever fought by the British, more significant than Dunkirk and Waterloo. How interesting. And on its heels came Sanjay, a friend with an idea, a ‘what if’ … about what could very well have happened in that little gap in history. We traded thoughts, suppositions, theories, read up reams of history. And the research! Thank god for Google. I wonder how writers used to write historical fiction in the dark ages before the Net.

And then those years of writing thousands of scripts and a screenplay or two paid off. I found myself naturally visualising and structuring it as a film. And at the end of 10 months, it came out as a draft of a screenplay. And then along came a publisher, who fell in love with the story and said would you guys like to turn it into a novel? A novel??? Like, a real, honest to goodness your-name-on-the-front-cover novel??? You bet. And so the journey began. Of course, writing a novel is somewhat different from writing a screenplay. A screenplay is the bare bones of the where and how, relying on brief descriptions of action and dialogue. The final emotional impact of the film comes from the marriage of image and sound, the intangibles created through the collaboration of the director, the DOP, the production designer, the composer and the editor.

In a novel, it’s all up to that lonely person finally parked in front of that laptop, dreaming up everything – the rhythm, the long strokes of pacing, the atmospherics, the tension, the momentum, the patterns, the landscape of sounds, the inner landscape of thought. Everything has to be conjured – with words. And they follow, word after word, sentence after sentence, chapter on chapter, act followed by act until, inevitably, a whole universe is created, peopled by characters you can’t even see. That’s how I did it – writing it down word by word, bringing it all together till it became tangible, real. Salman Rushdie once said that, in the end, only the words and sentences survive. He’s right. And I hope my words in The Wrong Turn will be enough, will survive in the heart and open the doors of the mind.

(NAMITA ROY GHOSE is an acclaimed film director and advertising luminary and a script /screenplay writer. During a school project on ‘The most memorable day of my life’, she wrote about a Russian girl on the day WW2 ended. She got her first rejection slip from the teacher for making things up. Ever since, Namita has established her storytelling skills through her scriptwriting, poetry, legendary advertising campaigns, and as a renowned advertising film director. She runs White Light, one of India’s top ad film outfits. A social activist, she is a co founder of Vanashakti, an NGO that works to protect the environment. Namita has done pro bono work on issues like domestic violence, child welfare, sexual harassment and forest preservation. She is an avid traveller, amateur photographer, foodie and teacher and lives in Mumbai with her husband, Pronab Ghose.)