Before Hollywood came to our neighbourhoods, before Santa Barbara flummoxed our crammed living rooms, there was Jeffrey Archer. Accessible and dependable, churning out thrillers in book after book, putting us right there next to people in positions of power beyond our budding teenage comprehension. White House to Westminster, FBI to Mossad, within our reach, occupying pride of place on the mats of enthusiastic sellers of pirated books in Connaught Place’s colonnaded, post-imperialist corridors (an irony to please any writer’s heart); held aloft by indefatigable hawkers at traffic lights; or jostling for space with Manohar Kahaniyan and Reader’s Digest at railway platform bookstalls.

Pop-up libraries, functioning from crummy, dimly lit garages in DDA colonies, stocked them, friends swapped them, and us of the ’80s generation got a new vocabulary that didn’t seem handed or drummed down, even as parents beamed in approval at “our love for reading........

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