About
Tej Arora
Tej Arora, Canadian novelist and founder of RazzyTech, based in Surrey, British Columbia. He wrote 500 Steps Down, a mystery set across one Sikh Punjabi wedding week in Surrey and Vancouver.
RazzyTech makes Relay for car dealerships and Relay Solo for car salespeople. Both are coming to the US: join the US waitlist.
Where he is from
Tej Arora, Punjabi-Canadian novelist from Surrey, British Columbia
I was born in Vancouver and raised in Surrey, British Columbia, the younger of two sons in a Punjabi household. My parents are from Ludhiana. I went to Khalsa School through Grade 7 and almost failed Punjabi on the way out, so consider the qualifications disclosed.
I still live in Surrey, a few minutes from the house I grew up in, and I write about it. Newton, a banquet hall on a Saturday night, a gurudwara on a Saturday morning, a condo downtown, the staircase down to the water at Wreck Beach. All of it is inside half an hour of my house.
The reader
Who he writes for
People who read suspense. Anyone who finished Lucy Foley’s The Guest List, Amanda Jayatissa’s You’re Invited or S.C. Lalli’s The Plus One in a weekend and went looking for the next one. That is the shelf 500 Steps Down belongs on.
Closer to home, anyone in the Lower Mainland who will recognise every location in it and know how late that banquet hall is running.
The form
What a mystery owes a reader
A mystery should keep its secret because of who the people are, not because the author held a fact back. The surprise has to be sitting in plain sight from the first page, in somebody’s manner or somebody’s silence, so that when it lands you can go back and find it.
So 500 Steps Down is told by one witness who keeps deciding what matters enough to say. Everyone at that wedding knew a different Simmy, and she is not there to correct any of them.
It is a mystery set inside a Punjabi family, and the wedding week is the structure the plot runs on. The rest of that world is in the Cultural Guide, which covers the week day by day, the places, and the words with Gurmukhi and pronunciation.
Method
How the book got written
I started out trying to write a memoir. It had the emotion and the dry humour and most of the moments that made me, and I kept stalling on the recent years, because some of those chapters belonged to other people. The question I could not get past was which of my experiences were mine to tell. 500 Steps Down came out of that. I started it as notes the year after my own wedding. It turned into a mystery about a woman who is a different person to everyone who knows her.
So I took rooms I already knew, put an invented person in them, and let the people who love her disagree about her.
Forthcoming. Publication date to be announced. It is planned for Kindle and paperback from my own imprint, RazzyLit. My second novel, Somebody Else, Somewhere Else, is upmarket contemporary fiction. It started the same way, as a piece of the memoir I could not publish.
The other half
The other job
The rest of the week I run RazzyTech, a software and marketing company in Surrey, British Columbia. We build Relay, a lead management and communication platform for car dealership sales teams, and I take on marketing and consulting work for businesses that need a system built and run rather than advised on. Before that I spent a decade in operations across automotive retail, marketplaces and ecommerce.
The book
500 Steps Down
A bride leaves her own wedding reception in Surrey, British Columbia. By morning she is missing.
Forthcoming. Publication date to be announced.