Mumbai is often romanticised, seen as a city of hope and dreams. What was it like tapping into the darker and grittier side of the city in your writing?
If a city is ever called the City of Dreams, it’s because people bring incipient dreams here. It’s not like you walk into the city and it’s a welcoming and wonderful paradise.
Everybody who comes to the city comes with a certain aspiration. And that aspiration is fundamentally part of the driving force of the city. But for every dream that is realised, 99 dreams fall by the wayside. So all of this gets changed into something very different. And that, I think, is part of the city. You just have to be fluid in the way that the city is fluid. You have to learn to flow with the tides. So the dark side of the city is always there in the people whose dreams have not been fulfilled. So that’s where the darkness begins to set in. And that’s where the changes begin to happen.
What did you keep in mind while writing your queer characters?
It’s not like a queer person is a completely different person from the rest of us. They have the same needs, they have the same wants, they have the same desires. They just have a non-standard, non-heteronormative sexuality. Otherwise, anger and passion and tenderness and gentleness — these are all to be found everywhere on the sexuality spectrum. So if you reduce a person to their sexuality, you do the sexuality and the person a disservice, and you also do that novel or your film a disservice. Because then that person just becomes a peg. They’re not a character that will live in people’s heads. So I think, fundamentally, to try and produce round characters? Characters who have many motivations, characters who have many dreams and ideas and goals. I think that’s what the novelist tries to do all the time, to produce real people inside the pages of the book.
