For many years, art, rather than writing, was my primary hobby. I used to have a mock theater at home all through school, and paint film posters which I would put up and take down on a weekly basis to advertise the films "playing" there. Mostly, I painted posters of Hindi films, but here are some examples of posters of Hollywood movies.

Once I went to college, I started painting watercolor landscapes and still lifes. Later on, I started using acrylics as well. Here is an example from 1988. It was probably no coincidence that I stopped spending much time on painting in the early 1990s, just as I started paying more attention to my writing.

Arch, Acrylic, 1988 (21" x 29")

When the manuscript of The Death of Vishnu was finished, I felt I had to paint a cover for it. Since the book involved Bollywood, what better idea than to make the cover a mock Bollywood film poster - the kind I used to be so fascinated by in my childhood? I purposely made it quite lurid and a bit crude, to reflect the kind of movie posters common in India in the 1970s and 1980s. I enclosed a color copy of this cover when I submitted my manuscript to my agent. It's probably what drew her right away to the book - having lived in the UK, she was very familiar with Bollywood imagery. We even talked about trying to have a more polished version of my sketch used as the book cover (which horrified the US publisher).

As it turned out, my sketch provided the seed for the cover created by Bloomsbury in the UK, which is very much a Bollywood film poster (notice the flames in the title!). The UK launch of the book was held in a bar modeled after Bollywood - and as the photograph shows, I decided to play the part of a Bollywood hero to the hilt.

Incidentally, I also created some covers using Photoshop. For instance, here is a sketch for The Death of Vishnu where I was trying to show the different levels and compartments of the building. It looks nice on the computer screen, but it wouldn't have worked well on a book, since the images are too small.

I also experimented with some covers for The Age of Shiva. Since I incorporated the copyrighted image of the woman with her child (used in the actual U.S. cover), I can't display them. The most promising one had the sky tinted orange, the sea and wave white, and the sand green, so that it looked like the woman and child were standing before the Indian flag, superimposed on the landscape.