Lining up the thrills

Ashwin Sanghi is finalising the screenplay of The Rozabal Line

The breathless conspiracy thriller reached India with Ashwin Sanghi's The Rozabal Line. In town to talk about the spanking new reprint (Westland), the Mumbai-based Sanghi said, “The notion that Jesus may have left a bloodline came to my attention in late 1999 when I read Holy Blood Holy Grail by Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln. I visited Srinagar and the shrine at Rozabal subsequently. That was the moment that I knew that I had to pull all the threads together and weave a story around these fascinating legends.”

Initially published in 2007 under the pseudonym of Shawn Haigins, The Rozabal Line was later by published by Westland, under Sanghi's own name.

The reason for this Sanghi says is because “I desperately wanted to have two separate lives, one as a businessman-entrepreneur and the other as a novelist. Creating the persona of Shawn Haigins was an ideal way to do this. However, when Tata-Westland signed up for publishing ‘The Rozabal Line' in India they felt that it would be virtually impossible to market the novel effectively using my pseudonym and I agreed to publish under my own name.”