How do you prevent attacks from becoming the very fabric of lived life in a city? Of course it's very easy to say you should be fearless and go about your daily life.

I'm pretty private as a person - people generally think they know more about me than they do, because I gregariously advertise what I want known. So it pains me to think people might feel they have an insight into my personal matters, which they most certainly do not.

Despite my critical take on the city, I love Delhi, on the whole - love its monuments, love how easily graspable the city's turbulent history is. The negative things I write about are considered normal here.

You can say that a small attack is one in which relatively few people die, but the minute you say that, you can sense the ironies in that statement. A blast in which five people are killed is a meaningful blast.

I have to admit that I was terrified of ending the book, precisely because I go around saying about pretty much every book I read, "It fell apart at the end." I have friends who are waiting to ridicule me forever.

I'm more interested than Philip Roth in understanding women, even if I do it imperfectly. But that book, Portnoy's Complaint, is literary punk in this way that is rare.

When I worked as an editor, I read new novels being published in India every few days. They excited me tremendously for the first fifty pages or so, and boasted some true linguistic genius at times, but none of those writers could occupy more than one mind at once.