I GREW UP IN “Bombay” not Mumbai obviously. It was an interesting place to be a child—we, (my father, mother and I) lived in a single-room set in a rented apartment. We shared a bathroom and a kitchen on a rather Tony area called Nepean Sea Road. We were paying guests. Rest of the tenants were Muslims, while we were the sole Hindu family in that building. That was an interesting point, I grew up thinking the reverse proportion was how things were in the country. I went to Campion School in South Mumbai. Campion students usually came from wealthy backgrounds. We lived in a single room, so I ended up never inviting my posh friends over to the fishing bowl I called home. As a child, I was mostly by myself and ended up painting, writing and studying a lot. The loneliness worked out for me. An added advantage; my mother was an avid reader. She had a big trunk filled trash and classics—Harold Robbins, James Irwin, Shakespeare and Irwin Stone, all of them jostled for a place in her magic book trunk. She would also visit the local library and let me borrow books as well. My mother was an English and history teacher, but her specialisation during Master’s was psychology and sociology. She started her career as a social worker, and also, for a year she worked under the then Prime Minister of the country, Indira Gandhi. She had a whole bunch of things working for her and I grew up having a strong female presence in my life. My mother was also a very open and liberal woman, especially around me, her only child. When at the age of 13 years, I declared I wanted to read Harold Robbins she accompanied me to the Warden Book House. I asked for The Adventurers, which, I think I received because my mother was there beside me, and because the librarian was a man who knew his business. India in the 1960s and 1970s was a vibrant, bit confused and an inherently chaotic time. Arts were not encouraged, especially Indian arts. I hardly read any Indian writers in school. But thanks to my mother, I was a “reader” by the time I was in high school. I believe that my parents were responsible for my life's perspective. My father was an assistant to Madan Mohan and then to Laxmikant-Pyarelal; three, famous Bollywood music directors. He had travelled to Mumbai to become a singer. He never quite made it as a singer and instead got shunted into the secondary profession of being a music director. I was listening to a lot of Bollywood music while growing up, probably because that was the most-frequently played music on the radio. We had an old gramophone that played 78 RPM records. We never actually had a “modern” record player, and so I could never actually buy “new” music. For a long time I never heard any “English music”. My tryst with Bollywood goes on strong even today. When I visited Mumbai recently, I bought remix tapes, all complete with 20 awful songs. One of them is a song on an antennae, if I am not mistaken. Terrible and terribly good at the same time; that’s Bollywood for me. My life and the times then were deeply entrenched in the Hindi film industry. When I started writing some familiar names slowly crept onto the pages. I borrowed Asrani (a character in my first book), who was an actor and a friend of my mother. Remember, Mrs Jaiswal who cheated in cards? That’s a cousin from New Delhi. Only, unlike the Mrs Jaiswal in my book, she is an honest player. During a book launch in London, I remember her standing up and addressing the audience with, “My name is Mrs Jaiswal and I play cards. But I never cheat!” Fortunately, I simply borrow the names and not the characters. Friends, family, acquaintances, Hindi film industry, its players—at least some of them—occasionally find a place on my pages. Is it a conscious choice? Not really. The India of my youth— was a time when a student who showed any aptitude for studies, was pushed towards sciences and mathematics. If you failed those, you might try something else. Perhaps arts? We were a middle-class family which meant that science was taken very seriously. My grandparents were refugees from Rawalpindi, Pakistan. Like most good parents, mine too, wished to see me do something ‘respectable’; become a doctor. Though I was good in science subjects medicine never interested me. In college, I almost ran into chemistry, then went into physics, and finally settled with mathematics after taking a class in abstract algebra. What I love about mathematics is that one can find definitive answers in it. It takes an amount of discipline; one needs to spend time in it. Sit down and comprehend it. When you do a problem and it works out, it is a great feeling. A professor suggested that I try to find a fellowship in America. At that time I was pessimistic about my future in India. Once I got the ball rolling for studies in America, the idea excited me. I was around 20 when I obtained a fellowship to Carnegie-Mellon in Pittsburgh. The year that I passed out, I obtained a teaching position at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where I have been working ever since. Currently, I am a full-time professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. My area of specialisation includes numerical analysis of partial differential equations. In today’s world there is a whole bunch of people who have merged mathematics and arts. I do not see myself as doing something different. Mathematics has not managed to exploit auditory, visual mediums too well. By playing around video and words, I believe I can make math accessible to more people. I believe that arts and mathematics need each other. My first observation in the US was that there was no hierarchy of science. Most people I met, seemed to dislike mathematics, rather vehemently. Which was the only shock. Having said that, it was easy to set down roots in America. As far as culture shock is concerned, when I came to the US there was none. But every year, I need my dose of—what I label as—the Indian chaos, especially to write. I began writing fiction in 1980. It was not a smooth sailing process, I received numerous rejection slips. Until the publication of the Death of Vishnu, I kept my writing stint hidden from the rest of the faculty as a senior member had told me, that mathematicians who pursued other interests were not taken seriously. Despite me trying really hard, I cannot place my stories in the US. Its streets, alleys and walkways seem too clean and too devoid of the chaos—my fodder. This is a vibrant chaos that I miss sometimes, the one that is rooted in India. I have tried, several times, to place stories in my now-familiar home. But I have failed. Therefore, the compulsory trips that I make to India—thrice every year or more—are when I recharge my writing batteries. Then I expend that energy at my leisure. In August 1994, a man named Vishnu died in the stairway landing in my parents’ apartment. To mark his death because he was a nobody, I started to write about him. The Death of Vishnu, as a short story started there. I hopelessly abandoned the story almost two years later after suffering a rather severe bout of writer’s block. I was stuck in the third chapter. I enrolled into a five-day workshop at the Fine Arts Work Centre in Provincetown, Massachussetts, under Michael Cunninham. Though we dealt with another short story as a writing exercise (a story that I was actually interested in), Cunningham was more focused on the short story that I was stuck on. He egged me on to finish it and when it was complete, its excerpt was published in the New Yorker, entitled The Seven Circles. That led to W.W. Norton getting to see it and ultimately agreeing to publish it. Each time when I have released a book, there has been gap of two to three years when I could not write at all. I seem drained and exhausted by the effort. This time I am hoping to break my threeyear- jinx as my next project, a math e-novel, is something I wish to create for everyone. I understand that everyone is a problematic target audience. Do I want laypersons to read it? Or, people with a minimum interest and understanding of maths. I have no clue as yet. I am hoping that once this madness of launches subsides and I am back in my quieter writing zone, I would know.