So

typically you read from a religious text.

So if you're a Hindu, you might read from different religious texts.

So for me, it was almost like that because it was giving me the conviction to write this novel, which, you know, I started out by thinking it would be a straightforward adventure novel.

And I could very quickly see that that was not.

And reading Melville was essentially the way in which I could convince myself that I was on the right path, that it was okay to do this.

And there are such beautiful descriptions of each of the characters.

which was also, you

Sorry to be flippant.

Yeah, this is like sea level or probably, like we are essentially at sea level, I guess, here.

But in Tibet, you're looking at 13,000, 15,000 feet above sea level.

But I saw the captain as someone, because he had already done different surveys in different parts of the Himalayan mountains which are you know very high the altitude can be high in other parts as well and I also you know as I said I do not want to make him a cliche or you know in some ways at least I try to move away from that I hope because I think many people did see it as a scientific exploration and there was no understanding about why the ways in which the relationship that the indigenous people have with the landscape, the way in which they may see ghosts or monsters, that it points to something else.

It points to a spiritual and a sacred connection.

That doesn't necessarily make it irrational.

But that was not something, you know, English people would have, at least the English offices there saw at that time.

I'm just thinking back to those essays that you edited.

yeah it was very it was very delayed so how would you describe your writing journey deeper

Very convoluted, very lost.

I wanted to be a writer from the time I was a child.

But, you know, I grew up in South India and it was a very, in many ways, a very patriarchal society, even though it was, you know, I grew up in Kerala, which is one of the highest living standards in India.

And even compared to developed countries, it is pretty high indices for writers.

literacy and women's education, women's health, maternity rights, all those things.

But despite that, it was in many ways a very closed-off society.

of the world was red, which was the British red because they were controlling

So where does that drive to continue to get up at 3:00 AM to fit everything around you, where does that come from?

Um, it's, you know, I've, I feel there are certain stories, um, that only I can tell, or there are certain stories that haven't I, that I haven't seen out in the world.

Um, you know, for many global majority writers like myself, I think part of our compulsion is also to tell our stories to the world because we feel that our narratives have been very willfully ignored or, you know, they've been pushed aside.

And part of what keeps us writing is to bring those stories to the fore because, you know, um, I, I used to be a very idealistic young person, and I think part of, you know, even today, part of what drives my fiction is the same impulse that drove my journalism.

There was some, you know, there was this desire to be very political in my writing and to talk about, uh, subjects that other people were not talking about or, you know, that people wanted to ignore.

And, uh, part of that is also the impulse that keeps me writing.

Um, you know, when it comes to fiction, of course there are other reasons that, you know, I, the reason I read novels, it's, uh, not just because a book is political or is making, you know, a statement about this, about the world, but also because of the structure of the sentences or because of the language or because it offers me a new way of seeing the world.

What pressure did that put on you in, in your own mind when your first book has, has, has done so well to then follow it up? Like, what, what are you thinking? How on earth are you trying to, like, move on with that?

So can you break that down for us as well? And also the intentionality in terms of the last of earth in terms of those points of views as well.

So, Gin Patrol on the Purple Line and The Last of Her, they're both based on true stories.

I was working as a journalist in Delhi when I came across stories of children who were disappearing and no effort was made to find them because they were often from very poor families.

The police would just ignore them.

The politicians would ignore them.

And I became interested in that story because I felt the voices of children were getting lost.

We didn't really know what their experience was living through a time when their friends were disappearing.

So, again, you know, is that something that comes to you in the first draft? Is it something that you come back to later and polish? And, again, how do you straddle the line of leading – into their beautiful writing, but not so much that it becomes too distracting for the reader?