I was asked an interesting question recently. As most of you know, all my books have Indian settings and characters. It is a milieu I am intimately familiar with, having been born and raised in New Delhi. Those formative years are what I plumb for my locales, my characters and their stories. I am an Indian by birth, and even though I am a naturalised British citizen now, nothing can take that Indian identity out of me.
The question was, why didn’t I write stories based in the United Kingdom? After all, I have lived here for over two decades and surely that counts for something?
That got me thinking. Why am I unable to translate what I see around me, or my own experiences into stories worth telling? The answer, I think, is distance and perspective.
When I look back on my time in India, it seems like another life. A life that I lived well and enjoyed too, but I was a different person back then. It is so much easier for me to distil those experiences and percolate them to you in the form of my stories or novella. Far far more difficult to do that about my life in the here and now.
That’s not to say that I will not do this someday. Maybe even someday soon. But chances are, that it will take a few more years for these stories to fructify. In the meantime, I will continue to write what comes naturally to me, and if that just happens to be another tale, set in the fertile land of my birthplace, well, so be it!
