India, July 20 -- What's your first memory of Chapal Rani and what made you decide that this is a story you want people to know?

Chapal Rani is somebody I knew of rather than knew personally. I had seen him around, as I mentioned in the beginning of the book. But I never really talked to him. When Seagull approached me about doing a book chronicling his life story, I thought it would be an interesting project for me to find out more about him. It would be interesting to find out about this artist who was almost unwittingly a queer icon. He was from a time before we had this LGBTQ movement and had somehow still managed to live on his own terms. From these various things, I was actually interested in finding out about Chapal Rani rather th...