1. "Dirty Love" has been described as a book of short stories based on Mumbai and we came to know that your next is already in the pipeline, again a short story collection about the City of Joy: Kolkata. What’s about these cities that you want to tell the world in a different way? When I write, I’m not wondering what I’m going to “tell the world”! I’m trying to unravel something for myself. In the case of Dirty Love, that ‘something’ was the city of Mumbai. Unlike all the other places in my life where I found myself by chance and circumstances (Ethiopia, Darjeeling, Kanpur, Delhi, Calcutta) Bombay was the only place I chose to be in (I moved here from Kolkata in 1995). It was love at first sight, and Dirty Love is about my love for the city but, as the review in Biblio put it, “this love is dirty—just like the city it represents. It leaves it stench on you. It marks you; you belong to it. You reek of it from afar, and it will never leave you, never desert you.” I was interested in communicating the city’s claustrophobia and its expansiveness, its safety (as a…