Before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.

That's Anil's path. She grows up in Sri Lanka, goes and gets educated abroad, and through fate or chance gets brought back by the Human Rights Commission to investigate war crimes.

This was the time in her life that she fell upon books as the only door out of her cell. They became half her world.

It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.

Over the years, confusing fragments, lost corners of stories, have a clearer meaning when seen in a new light, a different place.

Politically I also don't believe anymore that we can only have one voice to a story, it's like having one radio station to represent a country. You want the politics of any complicated situation to be complicated in a book of fiction or nonfiction.

What is interesting and important happens mostly in secret, in places where there is no power. Nothing much of lasting value ever happens at the head table, held together by a familiar rhetoric. Those who already have power continue to glide along the familiar rut they have made for themselves.