India, July 11 -- 1The contents of the nightmares in Under Water are central to how it unfolds. Was it difficult or fun to write them? There are three nightmares in the book, but I wrote five. I had the most fun writing them. For me, these are micro-stories that feel complete in themselves. These nightmares were built on a real fear in South-East Asia after the tsunami. There were so many corpses in the ocean that people whose staple is seafood worried they might be consuming the flesh of the bodies that had gone missing. I wanted that fear to be part of Marissa's psyche. The novel is very concerned with the physical body; the corpse scene towards the end of the novel is the stuff of nightmares. In a way, Under Water is a very traditional realist novel about the quotidian and the ordinary. Writing the nightmares - a slightly different genre - offered a different kind of pleasure. 2Grieving a friend isn't given the same weight as losing a family member. Your book addresses these different standards for measuring loss. Being related to somebody by blood is the most random thing in the world. But there's a societal expectation that one should feel closer to them. [On the other hand] a friend is someone one chooses via reason and emotion. In fact, a strong friendship is unlike some marriages, where a choice is made and then people are locked into the relationship. Obviously, one can exit via divorce, but there's an institutional structure that can make you stay for longer because exit costs are high. People don't stay in friendships if they don't want to. We don't have a legal contract around friendship. So, because we choose our friends repeatedly, maybe we should mourn these relationships more. 3You note the difference in responses towards Hurricane Sandy (2012) and the Indian Ocean tsunami (2004). I wanted this book to present the vast difference between the way the Western media responded to a catastrophe in which less than 300 people died, and another in which 250,000 people died. I went to a school in Singapore, where parents cared deeply about deaths in America or Europe and seemed unconcerned about tens of thousands of people dying in natural disasters in countries close by. Even as an 11-year-old, this felt wrong. I felt the same when Sandy happened. There was coverage for weeks. 4You invoke Tennyson's poetry in the novel. In Memoriam by Tennyson is a huge influence. Tennyson talks about the inability of language to put grief into words. My etymological digressions in the book, looking at the origin of words like "nepenthe", are attempts to understand when language can be useful, and when words don't do what we want them to do....