As a teacher, I can help my students see what is working and not working. I can show them certain solutions. I can guide them to books that will serve as role models. Largely, though, one learns to write almost like developing muscle memory, and this requires years of effort.

Seven years into writing a novel, I started to lose my mind. My thirty-seventh birthday had just come and gone, the end of 2008 was approaching, and I was constantly aware of how little I had managed to accomplish.

If anybody reads an Indian newspaper, all these things are obvious, and so I am not breaking news. All I am doing is representing my community as it actually is. Also, I have to assume that readers are sophisticated enough to know that not every person in a community is the same, and so there are many people who would not force an abortion just because a fetus is female. Even within my stories, people hold opposing views.

Money is part of how we move through the world, what stores and restaurants we go into, whether we take a train to the airport or a taxi. Describing characters living in the real world requires describing them engaging with money. There are also so many emotional aspects to money - feelings of inadequacy, feelings of security. I am not sure if there needs to be more about money in fiction, but the absence of this aspect can make a story feel somehow frictionless and unreal.

It's easy when you grow up in fear to act out of fear. I don't want to embrace that fear; I prefer to be kind.

It is hard to create a first-person narrator that can be a child and yet is able to take in enough information for the narrative to be legible to the reader.

Why do people always think hurting others is all right, as long as they hurt themselves as well?