1. I am writing to you from Bangalore, where are you writing to us from?
 

I’m writing to you from a sweaty July in Delhi.
 

2. Delhi, Beirut, Prague, Bombay, Spiti, Faridabad, Bandra, Marine Drive, Online. These are the chapter titles of your debut novel No Place to Call My Own. How did you arrive at this cartography for the book?
 

I arrived at the structure quite intuitively. The novel isn't driven by chronology as much as it is by geography. Each place marks an emotional and political shift in Sophia’s life, and each city asks a different question around belonging.

I was interested in how places shape us psychologically. Delhi, Prague, Beirut, Bombay, Spiti; they're all characters in their own right. And "Online" felt just as important because so much of contemporary intimacy, identity and memory now exists in the digital space.

The chapter titles became a kind of emotional map. Rather than tracing a journey from one place to another, they trace Sophia’s evolving understanding of what home means.

3. Were memory and imagination elemental in re-creating these places? Are there any cities here that you have actually not been to? What did researching them for fiction look like?

While writing, memory and imagination were inseparable. Even the places I've lived in or visited exist in the novel as remembered places rather than documented ones. Memory is selective; it compresses, distorts and invents and fiction allows me to lean into that.

I've been to every city in the novel, but each one had to be reimagined on the page. Research wasn't just about getting the details right; it was about documenting certain collective symbols that the unconscious might be aware of, the texture of a place– its sights, sounds, smells– the way a body moves through a place– these experiences are inherently political. What helped was that I maintain an ongoing record or daily note taking over several years; just a haphazard list of observations and such. Referring back to this helped me situate myself in that particular place or time period. 

More importantly, the novel isn’t trying to document these cities as they are; I’m interested in how they are experienced, remembered and transformed through Sophia’s eyes.
 
4. “Being constantly attracted to somebody seems super draining, Medha texts me.” Sophia’s friendship with Medha is as complex as her romances. There were sincere points in the plot when they stopped caring for each other, yet, somehow they stuck around. What was it about their friendship that held space for forgiveness which romance fails to?

I think friendships often survive because they aren't burdened by the same expectations we are conditioned to place on romantic love. We don't ask our friends to complete us or make us feel whole. They witness different versions of us over time, and there's often more room for contradiction, distance and change.

Sophia and Medha hurt each other, disappoint each other and, at times, stop understanding each other. But beneath all of that is a shared history that neither of them can easily walk away from. Their friendship is rooted in recognition rather than idealisation. To me, that's what allows forgiveness to remain possible. Sometimes friendship is the more enduring love story because it asks less of us while holding more of who we've been.

5. Before the publication of the novel, your short fiction appeared in many online magazines. Some of it, like My Best Friend’s Wedding (The Bombay Review) found a place in the novel, while others like A Family Portrait (Hammock Mag) read like a possible version of Sophia’s childhood. Did the book start as a short story?

Not quite. I think I was circling the novel’s concerns long before I knew how to write it. Many of my short stories explored the same preoccupations; home, memory, family, displacement, desire; and in hindsight they feel like pieces of a larger work.
 
My Best Friend's Wedding eventually found a place in the novel because it already belonged to that world. A Family Portrait doesn’t feature in the book, but it emerged from a similar emotional landscape. I don't think of them as discarded chapters so much as parallel possibilities. Writing short fiction allowed me to understand the questions I kept returning to until I was finally ready to ask them at the scale of a novel.
 
6. Which books kept you company while you were writing the novel?
 

I was reading Clarice Lispector, Mary Gaitskill, Alberto Moravia, Domenico Starnone, Elena Ferrante, Rachel Cusk, Avni Doshi, to name a few authors. 
 
7. Your film, Leela, shares with this novel the themes of female friendship and how a place—be it a city or village—can take a certain hold over people’s decisions and lives. This combination also gives your characters their unique circumstances. Could you please reflect for us what drives you to write about these subjects?
 

A lot of my concerns as a person in this world, as a woman, as a teenage girl (that I once was), as a Muslim woman, find their place in the characters I write. I’ve always been a very porous person, especially through my twenties, constantly deeply affected by the environment around me. This is a strength and a curse. It allows me to inhabit my characters fully and write as them, but in real life, it also makes me temperamental and impulsive.

 

I return to friendship as a theme because these are the relationships that have given me the most. Romantic love gets a lot of airtime, but I find friendships to be more enduring and formative. Perhaps, some of it is also to do with the memory of being very alone and friendless as a teenager.

 

Writing place is also essential to me because I don’t believe that our lives unfold in isolation from geography. Whether it's a village in Leela or cities like Delhi and Beirut in No Place to Call My Own, place isn't just a backdrop; it's an active force that determines who people become and the choices they imagine are available to them.

 

Ultimately, I'm interested in the relationship between the personal and the political, and place is often where those two intersect. 

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8. As the editor of Earthbound: Climate Stories from South Asia, you’ve brought together speculative stories of climate futures. Could you please share some of the locations these stories are set in, are there any real world places in them? How different are these landscapes, and the people inhabiting them, from our present world?

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One of the things I loved most about editing Earthbound was seeing how differently each writer imagined the future. The stories move between cities heating up, flooded coastlines, abandoned islands, isolated colonies–some abandoned, some entirely transformed by climate change. 

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Many are rooted in real places across South Asia, but they imagine those places decades from now, asking what rising seas, extreme heat, displacement or ecological collapse might do to the landscapes we know and the people who inhabit them.
 

The futures the writers wrote didn't feel distant or fantastical but like extensions of the present. The technologies may change, the coastlines may shift, but the stories remain deeply concerned with familiar questions of home, inequality, memory, and survival. 

In that sense, the anthology isn’t concerned with predicting the future, it's more about helping us see the present more clearly.
 
9. Could you share some film recommendations that explore the idea of a place?
 

There are so many, but a few I can think of at the moment are In the Mood for Love by Wong Kar-wai, where Hong Kong becomes inseparable from longing, Paterson transforms an ordinary New Jersey town into a meditation on routine, creativity and attention. Roma, which renders Mexico City through memory; The Wind Will Carry Us by Abbas Kiarostami, where landscape shapes both time and perception; and Drive My Car, which uses Hiroshima as an emotional terrain rather than merely a setting.

10. Are you working on anything new? What can we expect to read next?
 

I have been flirting with several ideas before abandoning them but the sense of a novel is beginning to finally take shape– about the evolution of a relationship structured around six parts of the body that shape not just the story, but the form itself.​