Tishani Doshi

I think Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie was such an important book because something was happening there with language, with a kind of exuberance that no one had seen before.

It was saying that these stories are so numerous, they cannot be contained with this realist box that it has to

jump out.

It's many limbed.

It's it's sort of, you know, it's it's such a extravagance of ideas and thoughts and play.

And I think that that book really was a sort of turning point in the way that stories about India began to be written.

Oh, yeah, lots.

I mean, look, I think there's so many stories about India and that whole idea of avoiding the single story.

Do you know, there are writers who I read who write and in a way what I've done with Small Days and Nights is to take a very

small story about a small town and try to insist that that is also an Indian story.

And it's not just the large urban sprawling Indian story that even from a quiet corner of this great big country, there are remarkable stories that add to the

tapestry and the layer, you know, of novels.

One recent one I read was, it's called Gacchar Gochar, and it's by Vivek Shenbag, and it's translated.

And it's really this quiet, almost Chekhovian novel about this family.

And it's just simply told and very beautiful.

And I thought there is an Indian story as well.

That what you said about the family created language is so interesting because I think that all of us who have grown up in families know that we have certain code words that we use, which we understand because we've shared this together.

In The Pleasure Seekers, I did that a lot.

You know, I had all this play with language and make-believe words.

And I think that essentially the idea of language in India, of course, is such a political one because, you know, which language do you choose to write in?