Post the revoking of your Indian citizenship, what for you, will always remain as your idea of India? Will you continue to write stories about the country?
It’s a little like that line from Camus: “In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.” There is an inviolate India, the understructure of my creativity that is beyond the reach of this government, but I must also contend with the fact that the physical country has now closed behind me, taking with it everyone I know and love. I don’t know what the effect of this closure will have on my imagination, whether it will be suggestive, or sterile. Many writers have worked out of loss — Bellow from his childhood Chicago; Chaim Grade from Jewish Vilnius, or Vincent O Carter from Black Kansas City. Perhaps, the same will be true of me, perhaps this loss will feed my creativity, allowing me to write and document a world that has ceased to exist — and, as an extension, salvage and recreate what is gone.

How did you shortlist these locations for A Return To Self (HarperCollins India)?
I have this amazing collaboration with the novelist Hanya Yanagihara, who is also the editor-in-chief at T Magazine. She has a great feeling for my concerns, related to syncretism, historical controversy and the unquiet fault lines of the past. She puts a lot of thought into what assignments would work for me, such as writing about the lotus in Hindu-Buddhist thought, or Islamic Spain. Each of these places are like the facets of a mirror, allowing me to explore my deepest preoccupations. In Spain, particularly, I was able to reckon with the existence of a plural society that had been violently cleansed of its plurality. For an Indian — [Spain fell to the Arabs within a year of Sindh] — you can imagine how this is an extremely emotive subject, a way to deal with the present through the ghosts of the past. Each of these pieces are like that — an exercise in finding the ideal fit between the writer, the place and the world beyond. I have used the alienation of background as a way to better see myself.

Gallengolla Rajamaha Vihara, Sri Lanka