Why couldn't she be part of that family? rent a room in someone else's life.

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'm always in the kitchen, cooking and experimenting - I love it. And every now and then I think, 'I should write a cookbook' or, 'I should write for food magazines.' And then I get drawn back to writing fiction again.

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.

If you write a lovely story about India, you're criticized for selling an exotic version of India. And if you write critically about India, you're seen as portraying it in a negative light - it also seems to be a popular way to present India, sort of mangoes and beggars.

Why couldn't she be part of that family? rent a room in someone else's life.

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