At the age of eight, I decided to become an archaeologist. I had no idea what the word meant, but it sounded cool. When it became apparent a career in archaeology would require significant education, I switched my aspirations to creative writing, the only class in high school that did not involve reading textbooks.

Writing novels turned out to be less than lucrative. Writing computer programs, on the other hand, paid extremely well in the early seventies. I became a nerd and surfed the technology wave for thirty-five years. This is a very boring period of my life. I will spare you the details.

In 2007, in the grip of a delayed mid-life crisis, I abandoned my secure niche in a cube farm, took early retirement and moved to India. I signed on as a volunteer with a social services organization in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, and had many wonderful adventures exploring South India, meeting the people, and learning their culture. My western background created many challenges for me during this time, but the only truly insurmountable difficulty was the dearth of interesting reading material.

I’m a fiction junkie. For most of my life, I’ve had a three novel a week monkey on my back. During my first months In India, I had the good fortune to live not far from an old-fashioned subscription library run by a dignified, middle-aged man with a British accent and a passion for New York Times bestsellers. His stock-in-trade was primarily Tamil romances and tattered Marvel comics but at the back of the library he kept his prized collection of English novels; six double-stacked shelves of yellowing paperbacks laboriously accumulated over twenty years. His taste was eclectic to say the least, everything from Aldus Huxley to Zane Grey via Lee Child and Maeve Binchy. His rates were more than reasonable; less than fifty cents a week got me all the books I needed to feed my habit.

One day, I walked over to return some books and found the metal shutter pulled down over the entrance to the library. The young man who ran the internet cafe next door told me the building that housed the library had been sold, and the librarian had relocated, but left no forwarding address. Unable to quit reading cold turkey, I began making weekly excursions to Higginbothams, Chennai’s famous English bookstore. The journey was long, the prices were exorbitant and the selection of modern novels was less than impressive. I frequently returned home with nothing at all.

Desperate for something to satisfy my fiction addiction, I began writing my own novel, using the people around me and the stories they told as inspiration. I scouted out locations around the city, photographing buildings and inviting myself into homes as varied as marble mansions and slum hovels. I followed my maid through her daily routine and tried, with little success, to do what she did. I subjected my incredibly patient Indian friends to endless interrogations about their culture and poured over the case files of the social services organization where I volunteered to understand the challenges faced by my characters. In the process, I discovered that writing a novel was almost as much fun as reading one. It took considerably longer, which was a blessing given the number of book-less hours I had to fill. But Sisters of the Sari didn't just fill my days, it filled my heart, as the characters became my imaginary friends.

Now, writing isn't for everyone, at least not novel writing. It's solitary, occasionally frustrating, and frequently annoying - especially when one of my imaginary friends does something that results in whole chapters having to be re-written. But it works for me and now, forty years after turning my back on writing, I'm at the keyboard again and delighted to be here.