India, Aug. 30 -- 1The South was conceived as an 800-page epic, but you felt writing a book like that was "hypermasculine". Such realisations often escape writers. How did you rethink the book as part of a quartet? It was easy. When I first started writing what would become The South, I realised very quickly that I didn't have the ego required to write a huge weighty epic, a very male kind of ego, which involves believing that you know how people intersect with history over a long sweep of time; how history plays out and affects individual lives. I realised that what I was doing was imitating the kind of writing that had first inspired me when I started out. From then on it was just a process of artistic honesty. I wanted to write a South-East Asian epic that didn't presume a total understanding of history, but rather something more intimate. I wanted to accompany the characters as they lived through the years. It seemed more real to me and more relevant to the times we live in, which are more fractured and disconnected from the body. 2In the novel, body and land come across as crucial sites that inform one's ease with one's identity. Would you agree? We always assume that we are comfortable with our bodies and that there's some kind of cohesion between body and identity, but the truth is that most of us are not comfortable with our bodies. Often, they feel foreign to us; this is particularly true of many queer people, who have struggled with a sense of belonging from the start. It is also true of landscapes. We are expected to feel ease and belonging to our countries but often we feel a disconnect, even with places we have grown up in, as if people and places that surround us don't understand or appreciate us. That's what all the characters in The South feel, in different ways. They're all trying to find a sense of being settled - of belonging, I guess - in their country, their family, even their own bodies. 3There is a certitude with which novelists approach world-building, which you are perhaps moving away from. What are the challenges you face in this regard? You're right in pointing this out, which is why I guess a lot of the physical setting of The South feels at once vivid but uncertain. Vivid in the sense that the characters recall it very clearly in a visual sense but feel emotionally uncertain about it. I don't decide how to build the world of a novel in advance. Everything is determined in the writing of the characters, and how they experience the world they live in. In The South, the characters are at odds with the landscape in which they find themselves, which means our appreciation of it, filtered through their eyes, is similarly filled with a kind of hesitancy. It is neither beautiful nor ugly, neither comforting nor threatening, but rather it is all of these things....