Demystifying Myths About Human Relationships - Meenakshi Kumar

There is something about the Ministry of External Affairs and particularly about its spokesperson – many of them have known to have discovered or sharpened their creative skills while serving in the office. Either they have written books, like Pawan Verma or discovered their singing talent like Nirupama Rao. Navtej Sarna, the present spokesperson at MEA has also followed in his predecessors’ footsteps by writing his first novel but the only difference is that We Weren’t Lovers Like That (Penguin India) was completed much before he took up his new assignment.

“The book had been in my head for years but it was largely during my stint as a press officer at the Indian Embassy in Washington that I wrote this novel,” says the soft-spoken Sarna as he takes a break from his rather pressurised job at the MEA.

The novel is a story about a 40-year-old man, jilted by his wife and on his way to Dehradun trying to run away from his present problems with a distant hope of reclaiming his long-lost love. “It’s basically a story about the twists and turns of relationships,” is how the Shri Ram College of Commerce product sums up his novel.

Writing, incidentally, has been in his genes. Both his parents have been literary figures – his father, late M.S. Sarna, an Indian Audit and Account Service officer, was a respected name in Punjabi literature while his mother Surjit Sarna, has established herself as a reputed translator. So, for young Sarna, it was growing up in a house where volumes of Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham rubbed shoulders with the best of Punjabi literature. Naturally, Sarna took to writing early, beginning it with Hindustan Times when he reported on the Delhi University campus and later wrote serious feature stories for the newspaper. That was nearly 20 years back. Opting for the Civil Service didn’t stop his love for writing as he continued with short stories and articles for various newspapers. “The reason I chose the Indian Foreign Service was because it provides a rich bank of experience, from which one can draw later on for one’s writings,” explains Sarna, who is also an amateur photographer. “In fact, travel unloosens the creative spirit.”

Fiction is actually an escape from the drudgery of state politics and complex international affairs that form a large part of Sarna’s life. And even if his present job doesn’t leave him with much time, he has his next novel – a historical one this time – already worked out. And in between, he has already completed Book of Nanak for the Penguin series on saints. And that certainly wouldn’t be the last from Sarna, if one trusts his literary genes.