Anuvab Pal loves quirky stories. The playwright, screenwriter and author wrote The President Is Coming, a play directed by Kunal Roy Kapoor, which premiered in Mumbai in January 2007. The play, about six young Indians who compete with each other to shake hands with the former US president George W Bush during his visit to India, inspired Hindi filmmaker Rohan Sippy, who adapted it into a movie with the same name, for which Pal wrote the screenplay and Kapoor did the direction.

The Sippy-produced film was released in January this year. In less than a year, the story of the play and the movie is out as a book under the same name. It is Pal’s first book. “It did happen exactly in the reverse order,” says Pal about the play-to-movie-to-book trajectory of The President Is Coming. According to the writer, the book-to-the-movie route is fairly simple.

“Let me make it clear that video, online and mobile games are not next in line. The story ends here,” says Pal. He says it is the last part in its artistic trifecta. For Pal, the only difference in all the three formats is the manner in which the story is narrated.

In adapting the play and the movie into a book, the hardest part is who is telling the story, who is narrating it to us and why?

“In the play, stories were played out. Characters were just in and of themselves. And you believed the context. It was a US consulate that was hosting this event, searching for a young Indian. You believed all that. The world was real, though characters were a bit unreal,” says Pal.

The biggest problem is the moment a narrator enters that environment and attempts to be funny; it sort of destroys the whole point. “The point is those characters are a bit quirky and a bit insane. You want them to evolve on their own. You don’t necessarily want somebody else imposing or trying to be funny on top of that. If I write a book version and introduce a narrator and if the narrator is equally ridiculous, then no one will believe the credibility of the whole situation,” says Pal.

The book is almost like a compilation. “I have taken press reports, e-mails, peoples’ SMSs, news clips, personal statements, and documents that consulate keep. It is like as if it is an assorted assemblage of information rather than straight fiction,” explains Pal. Once he found that angle, he says, he would make the book and it would work.

It is fiction, though Pal makes it look like non-fiction. He admits that both in the play and movie, he couldn’t dwell on the different shades of each character because he was restricting his story about the candidates within the specified time duration. “In the play and movie, aspirational young Indians are trying to do something or say something. The consulate is trying to achieve something. Bush is trying to achieve something during his visit and at the same time media is trying to somehow ac­hieve something and make something out of his visit. I couldn’t tell all of these stories in the play and movie. Therefore, a lot of stories had to be thrown out,” he says.

Pal says had he done that, he would have digressed from the central story. “In the play and movie, the story has to constantly keep moving through the characters. But in the book, I could describe things beyond characters, which for me was a bit of relief,” he adds.

Pal, who has taken a reverse route of movie-to-book, seems to be strengthening his forte. He is now working on a book about the seminal influence of Disco Dancer, a 1982 Hindi film directed by Babbar Subhash, starring Mithun Chakraborty.