When I first received Aarti’s 350-page diary, I wasn't just a writer. I was a curator of a life. I made a choice that still keeps me up at night: I skipped entire chapters. Not because they weren't important, but because some truths are too heavy for a single book. I chose the moments that pulsed with the most heat, the most conflict, and the most courage.
I am still asked how much of The Approved Affair is 'real.' The answer is in the ratio. In the original diary, certain intimate encounters might have only occupied two sparse, breathless pages. But to honor the gravity of that connection, I expanded them into twenty.
"I didn't do it for shock value or generic fantasy. I did it to give the reader enough time to feel the radical trust that Aarti felt. I had to build a bridge of words over a canyon of silence, to translate a whisper into a roar."
This is the burden of 'creative freedom.' When you write about real people, you aren't just filing a report. You are attempting to capture the frequency of their passion. Sometimes that means taking two pages of fact and unrolling them into twenty pages of narrative, allowing every touch, every hesitation, and every confession the space it deserves.
But the harder decision was figuring out what to cut. There was a specific chapter in the diary detailing Aarti's overwhelming guilt during a family gathering, a moment where the sheer weight of her secret almost crushed her. It was brilliantly written, raw, and painful. I wrote the fictionalized version, stared at it for three days, and then deleted it. The ethical dilemma of writing based on reality is knowing the line between "necessary vulnerability" and "exploitative trauma." I realized that keeping that scene would turn the book into a tragedy of guilt, rather than a celebration of an awakened, approved desire. I had to protect the core message of the story over my own desire to showcase dramatic angst.
There are also the logistics of an open marriage that I chose to gloss over, the mundane, everyday scheduling conflicts, the awkward phone calls, the meticulous boundary-setting that Aarti and Aditya engaged in. While these elements are the reality of Consensual Non-Monogamy (CNM), they often stall the pacing of a high-heat romance novel. I chose to focus on the emotional apex of their arrangement rather than the administrative reality.
But there is a consequence to this focus. There are hundreds of pages of Aarti's life that remain in the dark. Files on my computer that I look at every day, wondering if they deserve their own breath.
I find myself at a crossroads today. Part of me wants to go back and unearth those missing chapters, to write a 'Part Two' of Aarti’s diary. But another part of me is searching for a new voice, a new woman with a different kind of secret.
My greatest fear as an author is failing the 'Authenticity Test.' I refuse to give you a story that is just fantasy. I don't want to write characters who are perfect. I want characters who are real. But finding a story as raw and authentic as Aarti’s is rare. It’s like searching for a specific grain of sand in a Mumbai monsoon.
Where do we go next?
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Until I find that next heartbeat, I’ll keep brewing my chai and staring at the snow, waiting for the whispers to return. Thank you for being part of this journey from the very first page.