Guns And Gandhi II - Moar Guns, Moar Gandhi

Warning: Contains 19th century women salivating over the sweet, shiny muzzle of a Browning

I’m at an impasse with this novel, one that I hope to snap out of in a couple of weeks. I’m just not sure how my novel comes across, and I’m having difficulty grasping the core of it. I have beta readers working on giving me their impressions, and I, too, am going back to my sources to get a sense of the emotional landscape of living in 1906 London, and of hanging out at India House. 

The last couple of bits I wrote, I hold very close to my heart. Both are follow-ups to the pieces I posted last week. 

In the first excerpt I’m going to share here, I’m following up to what happened after Tatya sent the guns to India. Someone had to receive it, right? I originally wanted to show those pistols being used, but that didn’t happen until much later in the sequence of events. So instead, I’m writing about how it was received. I thought about a commonplace door-to-door saree salesman showing up on a dusty, narrow street in Nasik, and the rest of the scene just wrote itself. 

My second scene is a f…