India, Oct. 24 -- 1Your novel could have been titled The Red House. Those who grew up in the 1990s definitely know of such abandoned bungalows, full of rich stories. What inspired you to feature this ghostly home? Years ago, I wrote a few pages centered on a small neighbourhood in Hyderabad. It began with a few lines of prose that drew its eye towards a landmark in the neighbourhood, an abandoned house. In that same opening, the perfectly banal reason for its abandonment is also revealed: that it fell into an inheritance fight, and became a "litigation building". It isn't so much about the whys or hows of such buildings existing in the 1990s, more that they throw light on contradictions that exist in our society, and contradictions are always intriguing. 2The novel explores how a person's gender affects how their "leaving" is perceived. So the father, Prashant, leaving the family invites shame on everyone except him. There is always a price to be paid for choosing one's own path in life. It is never without consequence to break with the rules of society, and the repercussions are particularly harsh for women. That is universal, irrespective of geography, and I would say it is even timeless. This novel is set in a time before access to the internet (became commonplace), before we could safely assume everyone had a landline connection, much less a cellphone. But in many ways that could make those same consequences harsher today. 3Besides gender dynamics, the novel's inherent queerness transgresses boundaries of class and caste. How crucial was it for you to centralise such identity? Artistically, I find myself drawn to contradictions. And class lines are the biggest contradiction of all. We value people who are self-made. Which would imply that there is absolutely no merit to a person's inherited class position at birth, given that it is absolutely random. After all it isn't like we can choose the family into which we are born. This randomness applies to wealth, gender and to beauty. Yet, as a society, we value these very things as if they were earned, despite knowing (they aren't). 4While Ganesh does not go to school, school is where humiliation is directed at Arjun. Would you say education is a key concern of this novel? We do not have a robust public education system in India. If you do have access to education, the quality of that education will depend on one's financial status. This is absolutely unfair. This same unfairness applies to access to an art education. The novel looks at this from a teenager's point of view. They aren't adults, and neither are they children. They don't understand unfairness, but are also learning the rules of society, while attempting to grasp the intrinsic value of someone the way a child does....