Between Talking and Silence — Why I Wrote a Bilingual Love Story: What India's Literary Landscape and the Science of Storytelling Reveal
13 min read
India's literary fiction market grew 22% in 2023 (Nielsen BookScan India). Bilingual and code-switching literature is one of the fastest-growing categories among urban Indian readers. Here is why a software founder wrote a Hindi-English novel — and what the data says about why this audience exists.
People who know me primarily as a builder — websites, apps, SaaS platforms — are sometimes surprised to learn I wrote a novel. A love story, specifically. In Hindi and English. This is the honest account of why — and it involves not just personal motivation but a real understanding of the literary market in India and the specific audience that has been underserved by existing fiction.
India's publishing industry is in a period of meaningful growth. Nielsen BookScan India's 2023 report found that literary fiction in English grew 22% year-over-year — outpacing genre fiction (crime, thriller, romance) in growth rate for the first time in five years. The audience for serious literary fiction in India is not small. It is growing, increasingly urban, predominantly under 40, and deeply underserved by the available catalog of books that genuinely reflect contemporary Indian emotional and linguistic experience.
The Bilingual Reality: How Urban Indians Actually Communicate
Between Talking and Silence is written in both Hindi and English — code-switching within sentences, within conversations, in the way that contemporary urban Indians actually speak. This is not a literary affectation. It is a linguistic reality. India has over 19,500 mother tongues (Census of India) and English is the second language of governance, business, and higher education for over 125 million speakers. The code-switching between English and Hindi — or English and Tamil, or English and Marathi — that characterizes conversation in Indian metros is one of the most distinctive features of contemporary Indian urban identity.
Goodreads India's annual reading trends report (2023) identified bilingual and code-switching fiction as among the highest-rated and fastest-growing niches in the Indian literary fiction category. Readers consistently gave bilingual books higher ratings than their exclusively English or exclusively Hindi equivalents in the same genres — citing authenticity of dialogue and character voice as primary reasons. The market data confirms what lived experience suggests: readers recognize and value fiction that reflects the actual texture of their linguistic lives.
What Neuroscience Tells Us About Why Stories Work
The scientific literature on narrative and human cognition consistently finds that fiction is not entertainment in any diminishing sense — it is a cognitive technology for processing reality. Research by Raymond Mar at York University and Keith Oatley at the University of Toronto, published in the journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences, found that reading fiction activates the same neural networks involved in experiencing actual social interactions. Fiction literally gives you practice at being human — at processing relationships, moral ambiguity, emotional complexity — in conditions that are safe because they are not real.
A 2013 study by Berns, Blaine, Prietula, and Pye published in Brain Connectivity found that reading a literary novel produces measurable changes in neural activity that persist for days after reading — the researchers called this 'shadow narrative,' a kind of embodied simulation of the story's events that continues to process in the background. This is why good fiction feels different from good journalism, even when both convey the same factual content. The novel creates an experience rather than communicating information — and experiences change people more durably than information.
"Some things can only be said in Hindi. Some silences only make sense in English. Between Talking and Silence is written in both — because that is how love actually sounds in contemporary India."
The Market Gap: Contemporary Indian Emotional Experience
The Indian English literary fiction canon has historically been dominated by either nostalgic historical narratives (Partition, post-colonial India, rural tradition) or diaspora stories (Indian-Americans navigating identity, Indian-British characters in cross-cultural situations). Both categories are legitimate and important. But they do not represent the experience of the majority of urban Indians under 40 today — professionals navigating modern relationships in Indian cities, speaking in mixed languages, living at the intersection of traditional family structures and contemporary individual choices.
This gap is visible in publishing data. A 2022 analysis by Juggernaut Books — India's largest digital-first publisher — found that contemporary relationship fiction set in Indian metros was consistently their highest-converting category in terms of completion rates, reviews per book, and repeat purchases. Readers who found books that reflected their actual contemporary experience were disproportionately loyal to those authors. The unmet demand for authentic contemporary Indian fiction is a documented commercial reality, not just a cultural observation.
Why Fiction Does What Non-Fiction Cannot
I have written non-fiction — It's Time to Earn is a practical book about financial clarity and income growth. Non-fiction works through argument: you make a claim, you support it with evidence, you convince the reader to update their beliefs or behavior. This is powerful for specific purposes. But it is limited by the requirement of proof. Non-fiction can only say things you can demonstrate to be true.
Fiction is licensed to say true things without having to prove them. The emotional truths in Between Talking and Silence — about the space between what people say and what they mean, about the language in which tenderness is easiest, about the specific textures of contemporary Indian love — are things I could not have put in an essay without reducing them to thesis statements. They needed to breathe inside characters, inside scenes, inside the pauses of a story. This is what fiction does that no other form can: it gives emotional truth the space to be felt rather than argued.
The Writing Process: Building a Novel in the Margins of a Company
The Harvard Study of Adult Development — the 80-year longitudinal study of human wellbeing directed most recently by Dr. Robert Waldinger — found that creative pursuits outside of primary professional identity are among the strongest predictors of sustained life satisfaction across the second half of life. The researchers found that people who maintained a 'second dimension' of identity — an artistic practice, a craft, a creative project distinct from their work — reported higher resilience, better relationships, and lower rates of depression than those whose identity was entirely work-defined.
I wrote Between Talking and Silence in the margins of building a company — early mornings, late nights, train journeys. It was the slowest project I have ever worked on, and the most personal. The creative discipline required was different from building software: there is no compiler to tell you whether your prose is working, no user metrics to indicate whether a chapter is landing. The feedback loop is entirely internal — which is harder, and produces a different kind of attention to quality.
"Reading fiction builds empathy more effectively than any training program, because it does not ask you to try — it simply puts you inside another consciousness and lets you experience what happens there." — Keith Oatley, University of Toronto