I am a fiction writer. I spend a lot of my time thinking about imaginary people and their problems. It’s an odd existence, perhaps not the sort of thing grown-ups should be doing. People sometimes ask me if I had always wanted to be a writer. No, I hadn’t. When I was eight or nine, I was very sure what I wanted to be. I wanted to be an accountant. My friends, when asked what they wanted to be when they grew up, would reply “engineer!” or “doctor!” Not me. I was going to be an accountant. I couldn’t wait to be an accountant. For me, accountants represented the height of cool. That’s because my father was as an accountant with the Government of India’s Audit Department. At dinner time, he would talk about his day at the office. He invariably made accountancy sound as exciting as exploring Mars or wind surfing or being a detective. His eyes would shine, his fingers would draw numbers in the air, and in the mornings, as he got ready for work, he would hum. I wanted a slice of the same happiness pizza. I became a fiction writer instead. I studied to be a computer scientist, worked as a software engineer for many years, worrying about things like secure distributed databases and evolutionary computation. It was a blast, but eventually I decided to become a writer. Once, I would have drummed up plausible reasons for the shift, but these days I’m more skeptical about our supposed motives and reasons. I write because I love to write because I write. I write all kinds of stories. When I’m cornered about genre preferences, I say I mostly work in speculative fiction. That includes things like magic realism, surrealism, fabulist fiction, slipstream, science fiction, fantasy and so on. If you’ve never heard of speculative fiction, I have an explanation right here. Or you could try Naiyer Masud’s Sheesha Ghat or a Kannada folktale, A Story And A Song. Truth is, I don’t take genre labels seriously. We must be careful not to let a division of labor become a division of laborers. This goes for writers as well as readers. Personally, I read the way a goat eats; that is, anything and everything. I hope you do too. My short fiction can be found in magazines such as Albedo One, InterZone, Interfictions Online, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Jaggery Lit Review, Mithila Review, and Strange Horizons. My stories have been translated into Chinese, Czech, French, German, Hebrew, Hindi, Tamil, and Romanian. My debut YA novel The Beast With Nine Billion Feet(Zubaan, 2010) was shortlisted for the 2010 Vodafone-Crossword award and the 2010 Parallax prize. In 2012, Vandana Singh and I co-edited Breaking The Bow, an international anthology of short fiction inspired by ‘the’ Ramayan. My most recent work is Half Of What I Say (Bloomsbury, 2017) and it was shortlisted for the 2017 Hindu Literary Prize.

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