Agent Nicole Aragi sent the first chapter of Kiran Desai's novel Strange Happenings in the Guava Orchard to Salman Rushdie, hoping he'd include it in a collection of Indian writings that he's editing for Vintage U.K. It turned out that Rushdie not only plans to include the chapter in the collection, but also will provide a blurb for the book, which is the story of a young postal worker in India who leaves his job, hides out in a guava tree and becomes an unwitting guru. Rushdie talked up the book so much that foreign scouts scrambled to get hold of the manuscript, and German, British and Italian rights deals preceded and helped drive up the U.S. sale to six figures, with Grove Atlantic president and publisher Morgan Entrekin (who ran into Kiran's cheerleader Rushdie at a party in London) "stretching a bit" to be the winner of an auction among several publishers. Grove plans an early- to mid-1998 publication -- and yes, Kiran is the 24-year-old daughter of Knopf-published novelist Anita Desai.