How India's artisanal fountain pens are making their mark

New York-based novelist Amitav Ghosh recently ordered a fountain pen from an artisanal maker in India.

"The last time I looked at his online list, it said my order would be ready in 95 weeks," the Indian-born author, most recently, of Gun Island, told me.

Ghosh is willing to wait for his pen to arrive from the maker, located some 12,500km (7,767 miles) away, in the western city of Pune.

Here, Manoj Deshmukh, working with a small lathe machine in a small apartment, produces high quality handmade fountain pens that are sold all over the world. He has no employees. It takes anything between one to four days to make a single pen, sold under the brand name Fosfor, he says.

Six years ago Mr Deshmukh quit a thriving two-decade-long career as a software engineer and began making pens in his bedroom as a hobby.

One of his first pens was made of rose wood - he simply scraped some of it from a rolling pin in his kitchen, watched a few YouTube tutorials, made a wooden barrel on a tiny lathe machine and fitted it with an imported nib, feed section and converter. He put it up on online forums for pen collectors, and got $70 (£52) from an overseas customer.

Today, the waiting list for Mr Deshmukh's pens stretches up to nearly two years. The 10 models come in a range of colours and cost between $70-$160 (£51-£118). "I am just passionate about making pens," he says.

Fosfor is among a clutch of Indian artisanal pen makers who are attracting world-wide attention these days.

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