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From its ready supply of paradoxes, life has bestowed a sublime handful on Neelum Saran Gour. She is an author who will not "arrange her life around her writing" or work to a fixed schedule, but in a prolific spell has penned four novels within a decade. She is much like an amorphous thought defying the captivity of words, yet strings together an effortless prose replete with striking syntax.

In Virtual Realities (Penguin), her new novel, she stalks the capricious Muse trying to resolve the mystery of Writing, yet resolutely goes on to demystify it by claiming, "The idea comes as a gift, it grows of its own volition."

Then, of course, there's the title itself: Virtual Realities.

It's an endless exercise, this inventory of paradoxes, but for Gour, 46, her latest work is simply an exploration of the process of writing-about its compulsions, its politics and ethics, about imagination and expression, "creational realities" so to say. For a woman enamoured of "psychology and consciousness", it seems natural for her to also probe the eerie connection between real and imagined events. Yet, Gour manages to steer clear of abstraction, grounding the novel in the reality of her protagonists' lives, their conflicts, fears and motives, all encased in a "cranky, bouncy, informal" language.

This last comes as a surprise. After 23 years of teaching English at the Allahabad University you'd expect some of the unwavering, pedantic routine to seep into her writing, but all you get are bouts of trenchant wit, a pacy, distinctive style. It was perhaps this style that saw her ensconced as writer-in-residence at the University of Kent, UK, on the Charles Wallace scholarship in 1994. Here she wrote her third novel, Winter Companions, a collection of short stories. Barring this trip abroad it has been a lifetime of Allahabad for Gour, who has savvily lapped up the "small-town" tag to turn it into a trademark-she defiantly brandishes her mofussil breeding in all her works. Typical of the woman who will review books with as great a flourish as harbour stray dogs. A writer? That seems incidental. But uncompromisingly essential. Paradoxical, did you say...

-Riju D. Mehta