The Literary Mirror

What sent you looking outside Delhi and Mumbai for this book?

A magazine assignment in Bhopal that ran three times longer than the editor wanted, because I kept finding archives nobody had properly gone through. I realised the book I actually wanted to write was in those archives, not in another festival panel.

Which city surprised you the most?

Siliguri, honestly. I expected a chapter about a transit town and found a genuinely active little press scene that nobody outside the region seemed to know existed. That chapter changed the shape of the whole book.

The festival-circuit essay reads angrier than the rest of the book. Was that deliberate?

It's the one essay I probably should have let sit for another year before publishing. I stand by the argument in it. I'm less sure I made it as carefully as I made the others.