India, Oct. 21 -- What sparked the idea for Dr Shamsi, a dentist with an ominous sixth finger, "caught between science and the unseen"?

I wanted a man who belonged completely to the rational world, accustomed to finding an explanation for almost everything around him, and then I gave him one thing about his own body that resisted explanation: that sixth finger. In our part of the world, something like that rarely remains simply anatomical. Someone will call it a deformity, someone will call it a sign, and someone like Dr Shamsi will insist it means absolutely nothing. I loved putting him exactly there, between those two worlds: the world he had made for himself and the world that had been waiting for him all along.

I think that contradi...