Bitter Chocolate: Child Sexual Abuse in India (2000)—which ensures inclusion of hitherto un-researched boy-children—earned the author international plaudit for being the first in the Indian subcontinent to courageously speak up as a victim of incest. For Bitter Chocolate, Pinki Virani has been honoured with a National Award by the Government of India.

Deaf Heaven (2009), her first work of fiction, was listed among international contenders for the Impac Dublin Literary Prize. This novel has earned her praise as a writer who is willing to take literary risks. Deaf Heaven subverts form and structure to experiment with a deceptively simple narrative underlining an urgent perspective on contemporary India, its internal terrorism and the superficiality of contemporary politics pushing the nation at tipping point into modern-day fascism. Critics called it ‘a truly Indic work’, a national newsweekly magazine placed it among ten best books of the year. Eminent litterateur Khushwant Singh praised the style of story-telling as ‘ingenuous’ and described Deaf Heaven as ‘profound and profane, all at once’.

She is currently working on her fifth book, Bloody Hell, a literary diptych to Deaf Heaven which can also be read as a standalone book.

Born 1959, in a Dongri-chawl (ghettoized area in one of south Bombay’s seven original islands), Pinki Virani began working as a typist at the age of eighteen. In journalism, she began as a cub-reporter for a newspaper and is India’s first woman editor of an eveninger. She is married to veteran journalist and public intellectual Shankkar Aiyar and divides her time between Delhi, Bombay, Pune.

Author’s Note

Dear Reader,

You have looked at the cover of this book, you have looked at its back cover and the question you might want to ask of me is this:

Have you been sexually abused in your childhood?

I shall be as direct:

Yes.

I could tell you, at this point, about the mostly mystical marrying of an Author with her, or his, subject matter. I could then explain how it is me who has wound up doing this book instead of someone else. I would not be lying as I lay out my procession of thought before you to consider. My first book, Aruna’s Story, is about the politics of rape and the rape of women; Penguin publisher David Davidar read my newspaper article on the nurse Aruna Shanbaug’s fiftieth birthday while she lay in a semi-coma, a quarter of a century after she had been raped, and asked me to develop it into a book. My second book, Once Was Bombay, is about the communal politics in what was once India’s premier city and the gang rape of it by politicians. This book is about the rape of an entire childhood, of scores of innocently unsuspecting children in the upper and middle-class homes of India.

But I would also be truthful when I say this: I have no compulsion to tell the world about the sexual abuse in my childhood.

I refuse to be a victim.

This, I have attempted in all spheres of my life; each time one falls down one must simply pick up oneself after weeping a bit, brush away the tears and dirt and move on.