1. A bibliomystery lives in two intersecting worlds—the crime and the world of books. How did you arrive at this form, and which writers or traditions shaped your approach to writing Chikkamma Tours (Pvt.) Ltd?

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I hadn’t set out to write a bibliomystery. I just created a protagonist who is, like I sometimes am, a little out of step with the world around her; who is always reading and thinking about books. I was in Bangalore when I started writing this, so bookstores were an inspiration and have always been a refuge for me. This is how the books motif emerged, from my personal obsessions.

 

On the other hand, I did consciously set out to construct a murder mystery in the old-school template. I started reading Agatha Christie in childhood and have read her books over and over through the decades. There’s something so satisfying about these mystery books: a puzzle to solve, somewhat low stakes for a crime novel (well, except in a few where you’re trapped in a house/island with an unknown murderer), some love affairs and petty rivalries and goings-on that have little to do with the murder but add to the confusion (and fun).​

 

I was also very inspired by the queer romances I was reading at the time: writers like KJ Charles and Cat Sebastian took on the somewhat conservative subgenre of the Regency romance and revitalised it by introducing queer main characters. I started writing in 2017, when Sec 377 was still in place, so these romances inspired me to write the kind of characters I’d never seen before on the page: young queer women in a city in India.
 

2. The travel-agency-above-bookstore setting seems like an ode to Bengaluru’s small business ecology. What drew you to this world?

 

That’s an astute comment. In 2012-13, my husband and I had started a startup. We gave up in a year or so as we realised we didn’t know what we were doing, but in one of our bouts of enthusiasm, we visited Bangalore and talked to other startup founders and business-owners there. I didn’t use any of that directly as material, but while I didn’t know enough (or anything) about running a tour agency or a bookstore, I wrote some of my anxiety about trying to build a business into Shwetha’s character. I created the tour agency in an assignment for Zac O’ Yeah’s class at the Bangalore World Famous Semi Deluxe Writing Programme (created by Zac, Eshwar Sundaresan and Anjum Hasan—all of whom were very kind teachers and mentors) in 2017. The assignment was to write something based on research of Bangalore, and I—as someone who lived in Bombay and was only visiting—felt inadequate. This was also a time when walking tours were taking off, though I hadn’t been on one (yet).

 

So I wrote a scene mirroring my anxieties: three characters work in a tour agency and the one who’s newest to the company and the city pitches a literary tour that the others are not interested in. I used the setting of a tour agency because of the contrast it afforded between the two insiders, Shwetha and Poorna, who know their city so intimately they conduct tours for a living, and this outsider, the main character, Nilima. I wrote about a nerdy, grumpy, queer (in more ways than one) character who is trying to impress others and failing. I suppose I was also less interested in spending more time in the kind of place I worked in— IT offices that were cold (in more than one way), conservative (with binary gendered dress codes!), and with dozens or hundreds of people in one building, with work that seems detached from its actual impact—and wanted instead to explore the kind of work environment where you know exactly what your work is doing and for whom, and only have a few colleagues who therefore become very important in your workday.
 

3. When you were writing, what aspects of the city “insisted” on entering the narrative? Did any neighbourhoods or city textures shape the mystery in ways you hadn’t anticipated?

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I had only planned out the most basic plot of the novel when I started writing, so the writing itself was an exploratory process. And you’re right, some of the ways the city insinuated itself were surprising. Jayanagar was the main setting because that’s mostly where I stayed, as a guest of generous friends, when I was doing the writing course. Then I tried to place every interview/encounter/adventure in a different neighbourhood because that seemed realistic to me: if the murder takes place in a certain area, the suspects are not likely to all live and work in the neighbourhood. That gave the novel a kind of expansiveness across space that was both challenging and rewarding to write.

 

The area of the novel expanded more when I came back to Bangalore in 2022 to do more research: for instance, I moved Nilima’s home from Jayanagar (unlikely, with her income and isolation) to Halasuru. I wanted to stay as true as I could to the character’s financial and emotional realities (and aren’t the two intertwined?)

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4. Your protagonists walk, commute, work, and eat their way through the city. How did movement shape your sense of spatial storytelling? Did you consciously map the city when plotting scenes?

 

While my favourite scenes in the book are when Shwetha, Nilima and Poorna are bantering with each other, I was aware that we need to spend some time with them outside the office as they guide tours and investigate a murder. So I worked out which parts of the city I wanted to move the action to, based on places I had visited and had vivid impressions of as well as on where it made sense to place each scene (where would an accountant who is not doing particularly well have an affordable office, for example).

 

Since I wasn’t in Bengaluru for much of the time I was writing and revising this, I relied on Google Maps quite a bit, especially for estimates on commute time. As I mentioned in my previous answer, I wanted the characters to behave in realistic ways for their situation: Nilima uses the Metro and occasionally splurges on a cab; Shwetha, whose parents are upper class even though she’s financially struggling, has an inherited car; Poorna has a scooter. I let those facts dictate how the characters commute in any scene. It made some scenes of the novel into something of a buddy-cop movie (where Nilima’s buddy is sometimes Shwetha and sometimes Poorna), which I enjoyed.
 

5. One of the central characters Nilima is a queer woman. How did you approach portraying her and the everyday forms of intimacy, discomfort, and risk that queer people navigate in the city?

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Some of this was based on observation and experience, and a lot on my imagination. As I came out myself around 2015 and later, I began to find myself surrounded by queer and gender non-conforming women, not so much at work but in the friends and acquaintances I made on social media and at events and through other friends. We gravitate towards people like ourselves, of course. And it occurred to me that I hadn’t encountered any novels that featured characters like us: something seemed missing in the cultural portrayal of this moment in India.

 

So I wrote not one or two but several queer women characters, which gave me the liberty to portray different personalities and social backgrounds without presenting one definitive stereotype, and also allowing a multiplicity of relationships between these characters: because queerness thrives in community.

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The way Nilima navigates intimacy, discomfort, and risk—somewhat head-on, bravely but also with a chip on her shoulder—is very different from how Shwetha does it—outwardly conforming, socially adept, but uncompromising in her own way. Sharmila’s balance of intimacy and risk is especially precarious, since she’s a cop who lives with her partner but is necessarily closeted.

 

And they all look out for each other in various ways: Sharmila helps Nilima and is worried for her safety, not just because Sharmila is besotted with her partner who’s Nilima’s ex-girlfriend and friend, but also, I feel, as a demonstration of queer solidarity. Nilima and Shwetha extend their care and protection even to the men who get unfairly caught up in the police investigation. Nilima and Poorna’s contentious rivalry slowly becomes a tender, supportive friendship. (Is Poorna queer? I don’t know: the book doesn’t say. And by having so many queer characters, it’s subtly asking questions of how we assume others’ sexuality.

 

Which readers have picked up on: a few readers told me they felt a romantic spark between Nilima and Poorna.) All of this reflect the multiplicity of ways queer people find joy, comfort, friendship despite many constraints and much risk. I wanted to foreground this as opposed to the violence and discrimination every queer person encounters to some degree; the latter is present in the background, but never overwhelms the plot of the novel.
 

6. In murder mysteries, there’s often a temptation to create larger-than-life characters. But here, your protagonists are ordinary women trying to solve a murder within the constraints of how women move through public space in India. Did you feel you had to ground them differently because of this context?

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I was exploring what it means to be a hero. I rejected the idea of the lone-wolf, larger-than-life, strong detective, and created instead a hero without much physical courage who nonetheless triumphs because she is observant, empathetic, determined, and capable of

forging friendships and inviting collaboration.

 

I tried to avoid writing based on what I’d read (except for the scaffolding of a murder mystery) and write based on what I’d observed and experienced, and what felt true to me emotionally. So you have Nilima and Shwetha balancing their investigation of the murder and their growing interest in each other with the routine challenges of making a living and planning for the future. They couldn’t realistically abandon their work to go chasing a murderer, so they have to do their investigating in the gaps of their jobs (or in Nilima’s case, perhaps do her job in the gaps between bouts of investigating).

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I like your description of “ordinary”—it was important to me to have characters who weren’t incredibly special or talented or privileged or attractive, but with both strengths and weaknesses. I wanted the reader—especially the young, queer woman or transperson—to be able to imagine themselves in the story, to be reassured that they were, or could be, heroes too.

 

And yes, the characters are always aware of being women in India—in a big city, so with considerable freedom of movement, but they look out for each other and make sure the other reaches home safely, for instance, as most of us are used to doing or having our friends do for us. There is a scene in the book where Nilima goes to a downmarket bar in search of witnesses, and a reader told me how uncomfortable that was to read, how she was scared for Nilima in a space full of men (and only men) who are drinking. It’s not a spoiler to say that nothing bad happens (this book is empathetic towards men of the middle/lower middle class), and the discomfort Nilima feels is more awkwardness than fear.

 

The characters lead their lives in spite of these invisible borders: Poorna spends her days zipping around on her scooter but goes faithfully home for dinner with her mother and the rest of the family; Shwetha is raw at the gossip she faces for being divorced but unabashedly has casual sex; and Nilima has been openly, defiantly gay since she was a teenager, even though that cost her deeply.
 

7. How much of the characters’ relationship with Bengaluru is drawn from your own observations and experiences?

 

Oh, a lot. I made Nilima an outsider, a new migrant, to Bangalore because I was an outsider, and could use my own experiences and feelings in her character. In fact, several of the scenes in the book owe their setting to adventures/rides friends took me on: the traffic jam where Nilima and Shwetha share a tender moment, the walk at the lake, Nilima meeting Sharmila and Hafeeza at the college campus where Hafeeza works. Some were places I went to in search of quiet and solitude: the neighbourhood park, Lalbagh, bookstores. I went to Toit (Bangalore’s famous microbrewery) one afternoon and found myself surrounded by men in pale shirts working on laptops. I poured in my fondness for the Church Street bookstores, my frustration at the traffic and honking and at how difficult transport is sometimes, and my love for a city that feels like home even though I don’t live there.

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For other characters, I imagined what it would be like to have this city be your home, to have lived there for a long time and seen it change in both wonderful and unsettling ways. There are scenes where I explicitly contrast different characters’ feelings on the same aspect Nilima’s contentment at a traffic jam, for instance, because she’s out of the office and not working and in the presence of her crush; compared to the frustration Shwetha feels, since she is driving and worried about her car and her busy day.
 

8. You offer hat tips to several authors in the book. Is this your personal list of writers whose work on cities you love? And were there others you wished you could have included?

 

I didn’t intend to have an exhaustive list. The books Nilima mentions are mostly novels set in Bengaluru that I’ve loved (at least in the scene where she’s detailing her literary tour idea) and a lot of crime fiction, with one unexpected poetry book thrown in. Some of this was based on what I was reading at the time, but I tried to filter the books based on what Nilima would read, not necessarily my own favourites.

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On a personal level, it felt amusing to have Zac and Anjum be the very first authors mentioned in the book, since the book wouldn’t have existed if I hadn’t gone to their writing course. Especially Zac, because he encouraged me to make that one-page assignment into a novel, and mentored me through the six or seven years after.

 

9. If you had to send our readers on a day tour of Bengaluru with your protagonist, which all places would they find themselves in?

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I’m afraid Nilima would make a terrible guide on a daylong tour, because she’s lazy and socially awkward. Still, her literary tour idea includes the Majestic area, Sadashiv Nagar, the National Gallery of Modern Art, and Shivaji Nagar, all of which are interesting places to visit. I’d include Cubbon Park or Lalbagh after, for a nice walk or a picnic!

 

10. Last book you really enjoyed reading?

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I recently read for the first time the classic teen lesbian love story Annie on My Mind by Nancy Garden, and it filled me with intense emotions, like the best young adult fiction tends to do. It’s a tender portrait of being young and in love, with heightened risk because such love was treated either as scandalous and immoral or as “a phase”. I wish I’d found it when I was young. Payal Dhar writes such stories based in India: I’m currently reading It Has No Name, in which gender non-conforming Sami has to move towns and schools, and is currently (I’m about 30% in) making new friends, playing cricket, and developing a crush on a girl.