Tishani Doshi

Who gets to represent?

What's authentic?

These are all questions, particularly as someone who writes in English, that we get asked.

But again, to return to Rushdie, who said, you know, the empire strikes back.

I think English has become a very Indian language and that Indian writers who write in English use the English language in a different way.

It has a different elasticity.

We include words that are mangled with Hindi.

So we have Hinglish, we have Tanglish, which is mixed with Tamil.

And I think that languages are actually far more porous and malleable than we give them credit for.

And that even though English, you know, has a particular structure and foundation, we can push it in many different ways.

So Lucy had been institutionalised and was born with Down syndrome and has some autistic tendencies.

And when...

Grace discovers that she has a sister.

She decides to change her life.

And she's really a character who's in a kind of crisis.

She's in an unhappy marriage.

She decides that she's going to look after her sister.

And for her, it's a bit of a moral question.

But it's also a difficulty between the idea of freedom and duty.

And so I think a lot of the novel was to try and write about what a relationship is