The P3-book club alchemy

Tarun Tejpal has realised his dream of becoming a novelist.

The launch for Tarun Tejpal's The Alchemy of Desire is either peaking or ebbing when a young friend looks around in bewilderment. "Is this how you do it in Delhi?" she asks. "Umm...the Bombay book launches are smaller."

A Page 3 face blunders into our group, volleys out gossip, grabs another whisky, and shoots off in search of bigger game. "Quieter," she says, raising her voice over the blast of Delhi's finest and noisiest, the well-heeled and well-oiled.

"More...bookish." The Char Bagh at the British Council is packed. It started being packed at 6:30 pm, half an hour before showtime; by 7:45 pm, late arrivals found that the auditorium had already overflowed into the lounge and the booze had followed suit.

Friends sing Happy Birthday to Tejpal, who's beginning his innings as a novelist with the same flamboyance and gusto that's marked his career as a journalist and founder of Tehelka. Naipaul has left the building, but he was here earlier.

Tejpal and he have been friends, or at least mentor-protégé, for years. A hundred cameras clicked, catching the same fixed beam that Sir Vidia carries around these days to fashion shows and writerly events alike, the benediction of a plaster saint hosannaed by the faithful, hounded by apostates.

He gave Tejpal the only kind of blurb worth having, which is a blurb from a writer famous for never giving blurbs. "At last...a new and brilliantly original novel from India." Sir Vidia has spoken.

And Delhi is obedient to his diktat; also genuinely fond of Tejpal, who battled it out after Tehelka drew the unjust wrath of a previous government. Now hordes of people clutching shrinkwrapped copies of The Alchemy of

Desire buttonhole hordes of others clutching copies ditto (HarperCollins sold out every copy they'd brought) and ask, "Have you read the book? What did you think of the book?"

Tejpal has let his hair down, literally and figuratively; he's signing copies endlessly, and finding something personal and warm to say to everyone who approaches him.

There's the usual backstabbing and bitching, all the stuff Delhi's famous for. The reviews will be analysed for bias, negative and positive, but the test of this particular novel and of Naipaul's writ will be conducted elsewhere.

"Arre yaar, hum kya bole, will the firangs like it?" says one potential reviewer. A book about the urgent pull and ebb of desire, about a young couple in love in modern India, about sweat and saliva and semen, about a ghost from our very own hills, should be as important over here as Over There.

But even through the goodwill and affection of this evening, we know that this book is just the latest in a long line of heralded contenders to the thrones occupied by Seth, Ghosh, Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and company.

It'll take more than Sir Vidia's blurb to put another Indian writer on the map. Right now, it's enough to raise a glass to a man who, all his life, meant to write his book. And did.