Twenty seven years seems like a very long time to live with a story. Veteran actor-director Pankaj Kapur says his debut novel, Dopehri (HarperCollins India), which releases in Hindi and English later this month, has been with him all this time. It has aged like wine, Kapur thinks aloud, when we meet him at his Versova office. It is here that the piece of fiction, which started as an exercise in writing for a film, witnessed many lives. The room has a touch of the old. There is an antique writing desk placed on a wooden table, and dim lamps that lend the space a warm glow. Kapur, 65, points to the seating area outside.

"Before this became my office, it was my home. This is where I first read Dopehri to my dear friend, poet and writer Akshay Upadhyay, in 1992. After listening to it, he insisted that we print it. He took the manuscript from my wife Supriya, and sent it to Bhopal, where it was published in a literary magazine," he remembers. Soon after, Ram Gopal Bajaj, director of the National School of Drama, Kapur's alma mater, visited him, convincing him to read it on stage. That's how Dopehri made its theatre debut in 1996, everywhere but in Mumbai. "For some reason, people were not ready to give me their theatres, because it was a reading. I must confess, I was dejected." It would take him another 20 years, before he could bring the show to his home city. That it opened to packed houses, reaffirmed his faith in the work.