The Illicit Happiness of Other People

Acknowledgements

THE NOVEL LED ME to several people in Madras, or Chennai as it is now called. It is where I spent the first twenty years of my life. I am grateful it was not a paradise.

Among the people I met were neurosurgeons and neuropsychiatrists. Some of them were amused to learn that even novelists had to gather facts, but they gave me their days. Dr Krishnamoorthy Srinivas, an unforgettable patriarch with eight pens and a tiny torchlight in his shirt pocket, Dr Ennapadam Krishnamoorthy and Dr A.V. Srinivasan have contributed to the novel more than they will ever guess.

I am fortunate to have the unrelenting confidence of the finest editors in the world. Karthika V.K. of HarperCollins India, who was the first person in the publishing world to decide my fiction was fit to print. Roland Philipps of John Murrays. Amy Cherry of Norton. Iris Tupholme of HarperCollins Canada. Joost Nijsen of Podium. The novel is a beneficiary of their remarkable eye, and the care of their team, especially Shantanu Ray Chaudhuri of HarperCollins India and Joanne Gledhill of John Murrays.

But my primary editor is a person I am besotted with — Anuradha, who was the first person to read the novel, and who began her analysis, as usual, with the words, ‘Now don’t growl …’

Isobel Dixon of the Blake Friedmann literary agency has saved me in more ways than I have let her know.

For some reason, my mother, Kunjamma, and sister, Aswathy, the extraordinary women who raised me, found it hilarious every time I asked them to recount, once again, our family stories. But they always found the time for me. As did my father, Joseph Madapally, a storyteller himself.

But most of all, I thank my daughter Kavya for delaying the novel.