I have an arranged marriage. Because of father I could never love. My father has been a government officer. He had a transferable job. Because of his job I never got a chance to love properly. By the time I started liking a girl in school or college, my father would get transferred and we would have to leave that city.

All I could do was feel ‘feel good’ in love. I felt the tickle of love, but it never reached love. I felt this feeling for the first time while studying in 11th class in Shahjahanpur. In a small town, when a boy likes a girl, his friends start teasing him about that girl’s name. At that age, it feels good to have your name associated with a girl. At that age, the feeling of love is not understood properly. But when that person goes away from you and you feel his absence, then you understand that it was love.

For me, love is a fantasy, not a real emotion. I don’t consider telling someone ‘I love you’ as love. I think saying ‘I love you’ is the biggest lie in the world. In my novel ‘Musafir Cafe’, Sudha says to Chandar one day, “People who say ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too’ all day long do not love each other. They show off love.”

I think, the empty space in our life is love. We all want to fill that void. Love is a hope, a wait, which every human being searches for. Every person waits for someone to come into his life and what will happen when he comes. The ‘good’ we feel in this waiting is love. Real life is very boring. Love fantasies make us feel good about ourselves. We start liking everything in the world.

When I started writing, love was visible in my stories. But my first novel ‘Musafir Cafe’ is a new age love story. It has now been accepted in the society that girls who want to make a career do not want to get married early. The girl from ‘Musafir Cafe’ is a family court lawyer. Her parents send her to meet a boy every week, so that marriage talks can move forward. The couples in this story meet not for love, but for marriage. Despite this they live in live-in relationship.

This novel is the story of today’s youth, especially the story of those girls who want to fulfill their dreams, that is probably why it was liked a lot. After reading the novel, boys and girls tell me, “You have written our thoughts.”

Rekha Nigam ji, the screen and dialogue writer of films like ‘Parineeta’, ‘Laaga Chunari Mein Daag’, told me after reading ‘Musafir Cafe’, “Divya, you have liberated the heroine of Hindi books.” This compliment is a big achievement for me.

Children of our age have never seen their parents, especially their mother’s male school-college friends, visiting their home. Usually, children assume that their parents cannot bunk classes in college or they cannot have a love story. But my book ‘Ibnebtooti’ brought the relationship between parents and children closer. After reading this book, many parents told their children their love story before marriage and how they could not meet or talk to that girl or boy.

Stories open up a new world to readers. In ‘Musafir Cafe’, the boy asks the girl, “In your childhood, have you ever hidden incense in a matchbox? The person who, even after growing up, makes you realize that the incense you hid in the matchbox is still present in that box, you should marry that person. The person who touches your heart, respects your dreams, you should marry him.”

I like to write stories that I can go on a journey with. Which does not let my curiosity diminish even for a moment while writing the story. When I do ‘storytelling’ on stage, I tell stories from my surroundings, that is why the youth connect with me. They see their own story in my ‘story-telling’. When someone asks me, “Do you tell true stories?” So my answer is, “One should not spoil the fun of the story by telling the truth.”

When young girls read my stories, many girls think that I am the character in that story. Many girls tell me that they want to meet Chandar of ‘Musafir Cafe’. Many girls said that we feel like going to Musafir Cafe with you. It becomes difficult to make her understand that I am not the Chandar she is looking for.