When he died, I went about like a ragged crow telling strangers, "My father died, my father died." My indiscretion embarrassed me, but I could not help it. Without my father on his Delhi rooftop, why was I here? Without him there, why should I go back? Without that ache between us, what was I made of?

The Indian diaspora is a wonderful place to write from and I am lucky to be part of it.

This way of leaving your family for work had condemned them over several generations to have their hearts always in other places, their minds thinking about people elsewhere; they could never be in a single existence at one time. How wonderful it was going to be to have things otherwise.

When you write on your own, you can write the extremes. No one else is watching and you can really go as far as you need to.

I love Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor. I read a lot of American writers.

When I was growing up the publishing world seemed so far away. When my mother wrote a book, she would look up the address of publishers on the backs of the books she owned and send off her manuscript.

No fruit dies so vile and offensive a death as the banana.