India, Sept. 20 -- Sonia thinks of how a story about kebabs can end up being something larger: "This was India. You might try to write a slender story, but it inevitably connected to a larger one." Was the novel imagined differently when you set out to write it?

When I started writing this book, I had no idea it would sprawl into something so large, but I was following the stories as they unfolded, with all the connections between a huge cast of family members.

It always strikes me when I'm reading a novel from Europe or the US, in which writers focus on just one or two people: there is no family. For example, I was reading Elena Ferrante's Days of Abandonment about a couple who fall apart traumatically. It had no mother, father, aunts,...