Book review 'The Wedding Photographer': Wedding shebang

Sakshama Puri Dhariwal, a young author from Delhi, loves reading romance and humour. Romantic comedy is definitely on top of her list of favourite genres. Hence, she couldn’t think of any other genre for her debut novel The Wedding Photographer, which narrates the story of Risha Kohli and Arjun Khanna.

Sakshama says, “The book is about a journalist and a part-time photographer Risha Kohli meeting a real estate tycoon Arjun Khanna on a flight. The Bollywood-style happenstance in the novel is that she is shooting his sister’s wedding the following week. Their story takes place amidst snarky quips, fast-paced banter and the whole big Indian wedding shebang!”

Coincidentally, Sakshama received the spark of her debut novel during a flight. “The meet-cute part in the book was inspired by a real-life incident where the person sitting next to me was upgraded to business class mid-flight,” says the author.

The outline of the novel took shape in her mind within those few hours in the flight. She wrote the first draft within three months. “The writing mostly followed an organic path, with the hero and the heroine finding their way to each other, and the supporting cast doing what Indian families do best — bickering, interfering and, of course, matchmaking. I spent another three months editing and rewriting, and a month later, I got the publishing offer,” she adds.

Like the flight sequence, Sakshama has drawn inspiration from several other real-life incidents to bring charm to the whole plot. “Since I’ve worked in a media company in the past, chalking out the protagonist’s workplace and the colourful characters that fill it, involved tapping into my own experiences from the newspaper work. The titular wedding takes place in a Punjabi family. The traits and nuances of many characters have been picked up from my own relatives. The actual journey of the romance, including the major conflicts and other plot twists, is more of imagination than reality,” explains the writer who was introduced to the world of books by her mother at the age of five.

The Wedding Photographer uses a lot of new-media communication modes like text messages, e-mail, and instant messenger chats in it. “It follows a conversational tone, with the characters often voicing their thoughts in the first person. There’s also a strong use of Hinglish, colloquial usages and Bollywood references,” she says. “The readers can expect to laugh a little, smile a lot, and even sigh wistfully every now and then, while reading the book,” adds Sakshama who is currently working on her next romantic comedy.