Tishani Doshi

And somehow, I guess I'm interested in that feeling of being in and out at the same time.

It's really interesting.

I remember interviewing Anita Desai many, many years ago and asking her

how she felt about it, because she was half German and half Indian.

And, you know, she grew up way before me in India.

And she said, you know, that it is the that the position of the outsider is the correct position for a writer, because you never you always want to look at things aslant.

You always want to be standing behind the glass looking in.

And I really thought about that in all of her books.

There is that real sense of

asking about home and belonging and what it means and identity in really subtle, nuanced ways.

And I've sort of carried that advice with me, that sense that the writer's role, whether or not you carry that hybridity in you, is to stand at the periphery.

Yeah, I love A Clear Light of Day, Baumgartner's Bombay, A Village by the Sea, all of them's a zigzag way.

I mean, she she's really a sort of writer who, when I think of what a writer should be, is somebody who steadily creates a shelf of books.

you know, that's what she's done.

And I don't know that she's given enough credit as one of our great writers of India who writes in English, you know.

But I think she really captures a part of India that I feel is somehow now you don't see so much because it's sort of disappearing.

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.