Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari is two minutes late for our scheduled Zoom call, but she is already apologising profusely. “I got the passcode wrong,” she tells us. The artist and filmmaker, who has amassed wide acclaim for her films, Nil Battey Sannata, Bareilly Ki Barfi and Panga, spends the next 10 minutes talking about writing, journalism, and how she religiously follows certain bylines in the newspapers. “I just love certain writers. I am not the quintessential Bollywood director; I am very away [from that]. But, I’m glued to everything [happening around me],” she shares.
 
It’s only when we flash a book at Tiwari that she laughs, apologising again—this time for digressing. The cover of the book we are holding shows the flower of a cannonball tree, its petals layered and exposed, like the protagonist Oorja of Tiwari’s debut novel, Mapping Love (Rupa Publications), which releases this week.      
The book, which Tiwari started writing three years ago, was completed only last year, during the lockdown. “The pandemic came as a surprise to all of us. One could have either cribbed about the situation [the lockdown], or tried to work around it. I chose the latter,” she says. Tiwari still had about nine chapters to write, when she went back to it. “I realised that this was the only thing I could do for myself in the given circumstances. Of course, we had to keep praying for the wellbeing of those around us. But, there were a lot of things that were not in our control. So, keeping that in mind, I decided to cut off from everything and focus on my writing. I would sit down daily from 4 to 7 pm, and just write.” Her manuscript was ready by January this year, after which work on the edits began.

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