I GREW UP in a joint family surrounded by siblings and cousins. It was a very liberal household with no discipline of any kind. Such was the case that when we needed money, we just took it, we never had to ask. Unlike other families, academics weren’t all that important in mine, but debates and elocutions were. Those who have grown up in joint families will know that it is a completely different experience; a joint family makes you tough, it makes you a survivor. It teaches you how to beat competition, especially if it is about grabbing hold of that last piece of momo. So my childhood was beautiful, spent is small and happy place— Gangtok, Sikkim. After finishing school, I left for the US, to do my graduation in Communications, and later joined The Village Voice as their marketing executive. The Village Voice at that time had become one of those papers which had a great past, but today, was clinging to its former glories. I was into advertising and as a part of the job I would be invited to a lot of parties, which was a fantastic thing for a 21 year old. Advertising, as we know it, is a numbers game; as long as you are getting them clients, they will be happy with you. Now it so happened that the person who’s cubical I took, was there in the company for a very long time. I had her phone and the calls kept coming. I didn’t really have to go out to get contracts. So life was wonderful. I would claim I had appointments and go see movies all day, or read at Barnes and Nobles. This went on for quite some time, but in the end such a life seems good for a while, but then you start questioning yourself. And that is why I quit, I found myself questioning every day, if this is what I would be doing when I was 35. I was looking into the mirror with self loathing. My decision to quit was very impulsive, but I had to take it. After quitting, I decided to travel a bit, see the world. I travelled across India with my college roommate. We started from Delhi, took the train to Bombay then to Goa, then we went to Calcutta, Darjeeling, Gangtok, Kathmandu and after that we went to Agra and then finally to Delhi, and then he left and I had nothing to do. One of the good things about the trip was that we were constantly writing, he was maintaining his blogs to stay in touch with his family and I was writing Facebook Notes. These were very irreverent tongue-and-cheek Facebook notes about my experiences in the different cities. You’d think that nobody would pay attention to such trivia, but surprisingly people liked my writing. The kind of support that came my way was really overwhelming. And I understand that it is Facebook, but the kind of people who praised my writing were the ones whose writings I had respected all my life. All these people said that I could chronicle my experiences and make them into a book. Well, while I did not pay much attention to these comments, the idea somehow had stuck by me. Soon after my roommate left I went to Manali, I didn’t want to go to Gangtok, because everyone there would be ready with a number of questions. In Manali I stayed at a very small place called the Raj Guesthouse, which cost `200 a day and did not provide hot water. I wrote my first short story there, called Let The Sleeping Dogs Lie. In Manali, the environment wasn’t exactly conducive for writing. There were quite a few Israeli people partying everywhere. When I went there I thought that I can never get any work done. But then, I think, I went into a zone and just wrote a very rough draft of the story. This was surprising because I am one of those writers who do not know how to zone out. I think I do know that when an inspiration strikes, I should not let it go. And that is what happened in Manali, I wrote for 17 hours a day. After struggling in Manali, I decided to head back to Gangtok where there was hot water, good food and the comfort of my room. While in Gangtok, I managed to write around four to five stories. My first story was based in Kalimpong, then there were a few based in Darjeeling. After writing the first few stories, I had made the decision of writing about Nepalese people everywhere and make the world aware about the Nepalese culture, which is beautiful. We all know how ignorant people are of the Northeast. When you open my book, you will notice that I have maps of places before every story. This is to make people aware that these places exist. I had gone to Nepal a few years back with my mother for Dasain (Dussera) festival. I had heard about the International Organisation for Migration building from people. There are camps in Nepal for the Bhutanese refugees, Bhutan has kicked out 10,6000 Nepalese people from the country. Because I was in Nepal, I decided to visit the place and carried a notebook with me. I spoke to the refugees and recorded their stories. Almost all of them had the same story. They spoke about the acres they had left behind to live in a dilapidated place. I knew I had a story in hand, and this one was more of a journalistic piece than any other I have ever written. When I wrote the first draft of this story it read like a research paper. I had to work really hard to make it look like a story. When I started writing this book, I knew nothing about the world of literature. I did not know that there was no market for short stories; I did not know who agents were or how things worked. In fact, in the beginning I was just penning down stories, the decision to compile them into a book came much later. And since then the journey has been serendipitous. I am a very lucky person. Know, however, that writing short stories was difficult and challenging. At a psychological level, the book had moments when I was just staring at the computer screen unable to write anything. Even if the strong urge to write was there, I knew I wasn’t writing what I wanted to. Initially, when such a thing happened, I would be troubled and would keep thinking about it. But then after a while, I started giving myself a break. I would read a book, watch mindless films, and then somehow after two or three weeks, I would get back. This is how I have finished the book. But like I said, I have been very lucky. To be honest, in India we have a habit of over embracing people. Look at Sunita Williams, she is not even Indian for God’s sake, but the amount of embracing she receives in India is overwhelming. Same has happened to me. But to think of it, while we are so appreciative of certain things, we have been extremely dismissive of so many other things. Take for instances, our own vernacular literature. I used to be fluent in Nepalese at one time, but now I can’t even write properly. Unfortunately, we belong to a generation that would be embarrassed to make a grammatical error in English but would brag about making one in Hindi. The colonial hangover is so ingrained in us that we have stopped paying heed to regional literature. But the fault also lies in the way the regional languages are being taught to us. In order to save these languages from dying, we need to remove the ‘chota Es and bada Es’ from the language, and make it a little simpler. Which would be the equivalent of not using a possessive before a gerund. We don’t say ‘my being there’ we say ‘me being there’. May be this way, the language will be able to connect with the younger generation. By now, I think I have made it pretty clear that I am a very indisciplined writer. And I do not deserve the praise that I have been getting; in fact I find it very intimidating. I have spent days thinking that after all this hype, if people don’t like what I have written, will they be like, “all this hype for nothing?” Thank heavens that the book’s got a good review and critics, have been generous. And I am grateful not just for the reviews, but also for the labels that have been given to me, such as the ‘next big thing in South Asian Fiction’. In all honesty, these are things that you feel smug about in private and feign embarrassment in public, but after a while you need to break away from such labels, before they start getting to you.