Time heals everything: Durjoy Datta

It’s been two years since Raghu left his first love, Brahmi, on the edge of the roof one fateful night.

He couldn’t save her; he couldn’t be with her. Having lost everything, Raghu now wants to stay hidden from the world. However, the annoyingly persistent Advaita finds his elusiveness very attractive. And the more he ignores her, the more she’s drawn to him till she bulldozes her way into an unlikely friendship.

What attracts at first, begins to grate. Advaita can’t help but want to know what Raghu has left behind, what he’s hiding, and who broke his heart. She wants to love him back to life, but for that she needs to know what wrecked him in the first place. Datta’s latest book, The Boy with a Broken Heart, a sequel to The Boy Who Loved, picks up two years after all that his protagonist Raghu held dear  to him falls apart. The book, much like his acclaimed works Of Course I Love You, She Broke Up, I Didn’t!, and Ohh Yes, I Am Single!, among others, is quite relatable and tugs at the heartstrings of the reader. It almost seems as though the author has weaved his personal tale into the narrative. “It’s not completely my real-life experience.

But it’s from a world that I know of.

The main protagonist is almost the same age as I was in 2002, the year in which the book is set, but that’s not to say we have shared experiences,” says Datta about his book published by Penguin.

With most of his works dealing with success and failure in love and relationships, how does he deal with heartbreaks? “You just give it time. Time heals everything.

Keeping yourself busy is another thing that helps get you over someone,” adds Datta.

While he may have aced the genre he writes in, he says this book was quite a challenge. “It’s an epistolary novel (a literary work in the form of letters), and sticking to that format was hard. It’s restrictive in a lot of ways and you get only one perspective on things. That was the biggest challenge. The pressure to not let the readers down in the sequel also weighed heavy,” notes Datta whose book will be launched in the city at Starmark Store on Monday.

Books apart, Datta has also written for television including popular shows including Sadda Haq and Secret Diaries, apart from others. “TV is an open-ended medium. That means that you must be ready to change the story at the drop of a hat. But that’s what also makes it exciting.

Unlike writing books which is a solitary process, TV is more of a teamwork. Having said that, I still like writing books more,” he muses.

For someone who’s used to bringing out two books a year, we’re sure he has plans for his next.

“It’s too early to talk about it. But either it’s going to be the sequel to The Boy with a Broken Heart or a Deb-Avantika book, the series that I started my writing career with,” he finishes.