The need for a "good erotic novel on India" drove Ananth Padmanabhan, who heads the sales team at a leading publishing house, to pen a sensual, racy and erotic account on modern love and relationships.
"Play with Me" is a novel about love and pleasure, and what pleasure can do to love.
"It takes relationships beyond emotions and is about the power of touch and celebrates the joys of sex," says Ananth, who is the head of sales at Penguin Books India, about his debut work.
"I wrote this book because we felt that there really wasn't a good erotic novel on India - and it came out of a conversation during an edit meeting. Some of my colleagues knew that I had written short erotic fiction before and asked me if I would like to attempt a novel," he told PTI.
And he attempted to write about pleasure in a way that "hasn't been done before".
The book is about Sid, a successful photographer in a boutique ad agency. He is single and has everything he wants - a good job, great colleagues and a hassle-free life. But if there is one thing that has eluded him it is love. Until the gorgeous, free-spirited Cara walks into his life.
Sexually obsessed, the two begin a charged affair that disrupts all his notions of love and transforms the way Sid thinks about erotic pleasure. But then something strange happens - Sid finds himself falling in love with another woman.
"The story itself took a lot of planning. I used an excel sheet to create a story board and wanted to write 30 chapters, no more. And lived with my characters and planned what they would do and how. When I found my epigraph 'for the pursuit of pleasure, and the pleasure of pursuit', I knew what I was going to write about," says Ananth, who prefers using his first name.
So did his association with sales help him to conceive the book better? "Yes and no," he replies.
"Having sold books for more than two decades I did have a sense of what readers might love, or reject. But as a writer I was paranoid - ultimately the book had to create word of mouth!," he says.
