1. You grew up in Gokarna, a deeply religious temple town shaped by ritual, pilgrimage, and a diverse mix of residents and visitors. At the same time you were raised by your father, Gowrish Kaikini, a literary figure and a thinker rooted in Lokayata philosophy, which often stands in contrast to such belief systems. How did these two seemingly opposing worlds shape you as a writer?

One doesn’t live or grow up as a writer, we only grow as a person. Growing is a collective experience. My father was a teacher. He was a seeker, interested in a vast range of things like science, music, theatre and poetry. He was a liberal radical humanist who wrote about great thinkers, artists, poets, and musicians like Marx, M N Roy, Aurobindo, D R Bendre, Edison, Eliot, Beethoven and Mozart. So, it is very difficult to slot him in a box. He was transparent and free-flowing. Hence, there was nothing contradictory to his being in Gokarn as even the Sanskrit and Vedic scholars, seniors and junior students, were his friends. There was a certain social domesticity to it. Shanta Kaikini, my mother, was also a strong positive and progressive woman. She addressed her husband in the singular as an equal, contrary to conventions then, which was new to me as a child. She was very invested in her social work, in helping women in the small towns and in her teaching. Both of them were always amidst people. Gokarn was a vibrant place. Any pilgrim place, or any tourist place, is by default liberal – one cannot afford to be rigid there as it is ultimately a business place. With frequent festivals, touring theatre companies and diverse tourists and pilgrims. So despite it being a small town, I have grown up hearing so many languages – Marathi, Konkani, Kannada and all its various dialects, the practices of native Halakki people, their dances and songs. This was the collective domesticity which formed my sensibility and this process will always be on.​

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2. After you write about a place, does it change the way you see it? Do you ever feel a gap between the “real” place and the one you have written about? 

Generally, I do not think any writer writes ‘about’ a place, ‘about’ anything. Place is also a very elusive idea, rather difficult to explain. For instance, in his dedication page in the novel Purushottama, Yashwant Chittal says that it is a mere coincidence that the Dadar Horniman circle of this novel, also exists in real life. So, it is not about the real place at all – it is something else. Those who ask me if incidents in my story actually happened to me, it’s a moot question. Situations trigger responses and stories. It is a completely different space and place. Chittal always said, ‘You don’t write what you know, you write to know.’ So for me writing is a mode of creating a new city. 
 

3. Is there a difference between how you live in a city and how you remember or write about it later?
 

What is memory? According to me, it’s like a flower that blooms on a rooted tree, fed by the sun, breeze and moisture of today. Memory is under the obligation of today and very much of the present. For instance, we are fond of lamenting that things are not the same as they used to be, especially when we visit places from the past, but what really has changed is us! But some things, signs are enough for you to trigger and connect to the lost space in your mind. For instance, we recently visited Kolkata, a city very dear to our sensibility. So, any fragment of the visuals and words from all the music, film, poetry and literature, that connect us to the city - like Ritwik Ghatak, Mrinal Sen, Satyajit Ray’s films, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay’s novels – are enough to evoke those entire worlds inside us. Same with Kerala, when we visited recently – Aravindan’s films, Vasudevan Nair’s novels, so a location arises in the mind which has nothing to do with the real location. It is different for every individual. Two readers of mine who got married to each other, recently went to all the locations of Mumbai and Gokarn that appear in my stories for their honeymoon. It is their journey, unique to their experience. Another photographer made a series of photographs that resonated with my stories but had no direct connection to any detail in my stories. The same place is a different journey for everyone. That is why we write and we read. It is different from reader to reader and writer to writer. Otherwise, there would be nothing more to say about a place after a writer has written about it, isn’t it? 

4. In your writing you take us into the lives of conductors, clerks, workers. What do these lives show us about a city that its more “prominent” inhabitants cannot?

I don’t want to slot people like that. We are all extensions of each other. Moment you think we are separate and they are objects of your project, or assignment, you stop listening to their voices. It’s a genuine connection, you don’t need to play a role, it has to happen naturally. That is the baseline, like a big family and its tribulations and joys. Our stories are not project reports at all. 
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5. You write across different forms—short stories, poetry, and plays. How do you approach each of these, and how do you manage to move between them so effortlessly? Does your sense of place or setting change depending on the form?
 

I don’t plan things. I am very impulsive, often writing at the last moment, single draft, pen-wielding writer. It is nothing to be proud about, it is just my way of writing. The unknown next line, next paragraph, next page is the biggest motivation for me to write. It is like the unknown tomorrow. Till you write, that poem is not there! That is the most magical aspect of it. My plays are all adaptations of existing plays. In my adaptations, I have shifted the context and locations. For instance, in war time Russia in Fiddler on the Roof becomes a partition torn riverside village of the west coast India in Jothegiruvanu Chandira, Britain in Pygmalion becomes Thippe cross of Bangalore in Sevanti Prasanga, and so on. Once the space shifts, the story, its rhetoric, tonality, rhythm and metaphors, all shift according to it. I just surrender to the story, or the images of the poem, and when the story and poem tell me to stop, I stop. 

6. In cinema, when you write lyrics for someone else's story, does your relationship with place sharpen or get constrained?

It is not entirely my worldview that I am sharing in these songs. I have to do a role-play for the story and the context, whether it is the first song or second love song, whether it is from the perspective of the actors or a situational song. For instance, if it is a song set in the daytime, I cannot use the image of the moon in the lyric; if a song is set in a rural town, what language must I use for the lyrics. Millions of songs in Indian cinema have already been made and they are almost always about love! So, the challenge is to find new expressions for love. The bigger challenge is to write for a meter set to pre-set musical compositions. It is a different skill and I love that. It has to be very simple for it to be popularly accessible. What I feel is that today’s pop is tomorrow’s folk. Today’s folk was yesterday’s pop.

7. Your writing has been described as umami for being complex, layered, and difficult to pin down. As a reader, one is left with multiple emotions at once - sadness, happiness, frustration, yet also a strange sense of calm. It feels very close to life itself. How do you arrive at that tonal balance in your writing? Is it something you consciously work towards or does it emerge organically?

I don’t interfere in my story. The story tells me where to stop. I usually attempt to catch a transformation moment and the journey with all its various turns, its details is towards such moments. There is a silence there. Every extra word after that point will break that silence of the take-off point. So I do not want to put any extra words in there. My conscious effort in my writing is not to put in any conscious effort. 
 

8. In Karnataka, there is often concern about the future of Kannada, not just as a spoken language or on the boards of the shops but as a carrier of cultural memory and knowledge. Do you see this as a serious challenge, or do you feel languages adapt and persist in ways we may underestimate? 

It is a challenge. Like many vital challenges. Future and past both are abstract to me. We are at a stage where present itself seems absurd and abstract to me. We should ask basic questions about why we need to communicate – is it for power? For money? For food? Love? Assurance? Hatred? Our country has so many languages. My mother tongue is Konkani, which has no script. The city of Mumbai is a multilingual urban space and any person in Mumbai can easily speak minimum four to five languages. I moved seamlessly between languages - from Hindi with the co-commuters in the local train, Gujarati with the shopkeeper, Marathi, English with my office colleagues and coming back home to Konkani and then I would sit to write in Kannada! If you see my Mumbai stories , Antariksh Kothari, Muchi Miyan, Asavari Lokhande, Popat, Dagadoo, Tejbali – none of these characters are Kannadigas but still they came into my stories and talked in Kannada. Tejaswini Niranjana, who has translated my stories into English, makes a point about this detail where she says that my stories lift characters from their linguistic identities. It is an interesting point. Human identity is at stake now. So many things are simultaneously happening at this stage – Kannada medium schools are closing down, language is being threatened and overpowered, only poor children are going to Kannada medium schools. 

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9. What, in your view, happens to the knowledge embedded within a language as it evolves over time?

Simple, I was travelling in a cab where the driver said English medium people sit in cabs while Kannada medium people drive these cabs. And the cab drivers honking in rage sound to me like the sound of anguish of all regional languages. Not just Kannada but all regional languages of India. Testing times.
 

10. Are there writers in Kannada or otherwise, whose portrayal of cities has stayed with you or influenced how you think about urban life?
 

Shanthinath Desai, Yashwant Chittal, Giri, A K Ramanujan, Vijay Tendulkar, K V Tirumalesh, Mohan Rakesh, and Badal Sircar

11. If cities like Mumbai, Bangalore, and Gokarna were people, how would you describe their personalities? 

No nonsense. Confused. Lost. ​

12. At a recent book talk at Champaca, I found myself sitting next to your daughter. When I asked her what the most writerly thing about you is, she said without any hesitation that you can write anywhere, and that you're the least fussy writer she knows. Do you recognise yourself in that description?*

I don’t fall into that slot called writer. For me it is a mode of experience which I am incidentally sharing with my fellow travellers with humility. This is because language is a public property enriched by everyone who is using it. Like putting together a big jigsaw puzzle, collectively with our own pieces. Science, medicine, writing – they are all in the same direction. ​

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13. Where is the strangest or most unlikely place you have written something? Also, what would be your advice to young writers?*

Strangest situation where I have written was at Prithvi café where me and my dear friend Dr. Nagraj Huilgol had gone to see Protima Bedi’s performance. We were sitting at the cafeteria for some Irish coffee after the performance, and suddenly she came and sat on the adjacent table. In the spur of that moment, under the pointed persuasion of my friend, I ended up scribbling some lines on a spare tissue paper. The poems are in my Neeli MaLe collection. As for you question regarding young writers... Advice–No. Request–yes. Please don’t go in search of poems and stories. Just get lost in the human world, poems and stories will find you. 

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*Questions from Divya Ravindranath (Co-founder, ​Cities in Fiction).