Goodreads asked Bhavini K. Desai:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Bhavini K. Desai It was my first year in Mass Media. And as is wont for any first-year starry-eyed kid anywhere in the world, I too was on a club-joining spree. One of those clubs, an editorial club, was running a short story writing contest. I was a part of setting it up, and because members are the first scapegoats, I was asked to submit a short story. The best ones would be published in an anthology.

On a rainy August evening in 2013, I finished my short story. It was called Rescuing Heaven. But it exceeded the word limit of 3000 by a hundred or so. Try as I might, it just wouldn’t sound as good when I cut sentences or replaced phrases. So I called my Editorial Head and requested her to consider me. Members were known to get special treatment, and there usually was a buffer for the word limit too. She refused.

So I spent that night frantically editing. Cutting, replacing, removing. Somehow I managed to slip under the word limit. But the final read didn’t give me the feels anymore. So I didn’t submit it. They refused to take the version I wanted to send. And I refused to submit a version that forget readers, didn’t appeal to me first.

That’s how I was left with a 3000+ words short story, which would later expand into a novel named The City of Pillars. That short story became the Prologue of this book, born out of the idea that great rescues are not of cities and countries. One man can seldom save an entire people. But even if he saved one person, it’s a good start.

A young soldier and a teenage orphan girl in the this short story grew up to become a solid political leader and a fierce writer. They grew up to be Atharva Singh Kaul and Iram Haider. And made me grow in the process too.

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