Tell us about a typical day?

My typical day depends on which day of the week it is – as I juggle 3 jobs, with purely pleasurable writing, recording and editorial activities relegated to the weekends, and/or night-time. Never a night owl I find myself increasingly counting on the quiet and calm around midnight to think, read and write. What stays constant (and therefore makes the day ‘typical’) is my evening film session with my husband, on our home projector, a ritual that sustains and feeds my cinema-loving soul; followed by my visit to my ageing parents – with whom I spend at least two-three hours. Highlights of the time spent together are (a) my mum reading out loud from Bengali prose classics (books I had avoided/evaded in my youth!) – a sort of home-schooling cum Jane-Austenesque read-aloud by an imaginary fire; (b) my father sharing his latest piece of writing (in Bangla or in English); sometimes a translation (of Pessoa into Bangla, which is an ongoing project, made more remarkable by his ongoing Parkinson’s); and (c) the sharing of food – Bengali and South Indian favourites, tapping into two of our favourite cuisines.

What is your future hope?

For the immediate future, my hope is that we will again be able to freely meet, hold and hug beloved people without fear; that writers in India especially will be able to write and speak without fear. I hope that the seeming diminishing of distances thanks to technology can be translated into a real human closeness; and that the great digital divide that has been so sorely exposed as a symptom of continuing inequities will be (somewhat/somehow) bridged; and that kindness will not be the rare commodity that it sometimes is.

If you could invite one person to dinner, who would it be and where would you take them in your city?

From the present I would invite Louise Glück; I would call her home to Thane, and over a meal cooked by my husband (a true creative artist) I would ask her how she goes to the heart of an emotional space with such clarity and intellectual strength. From the past I would invite Sukumar Ray; I would take him to my once favourite place for taking poet friends from out of town – Brabourne Restaurant and Beer Bar (no longer there!) and ask him to recite “Gondho Bichar” as we glugged our pints (after a few I might also ask him why he had to go and die so early – how much more we might have received from his eccentric genius had he lived).

What is your favourite bookstore?

In Bombay, Kitab Khana – space of love and books and people who love books. In Bangalore, the old Blossoms, with its stacks of delicious surprise and rare finds.

What does a port culture look like to you?

A multitude of voices, tongues, presences, cuisines, colours. A purposeful yet always embracing attitude towards work (and play!). An air of expectation, brisk and insouciant, buoyant and filled with the tang of mysterious (sometimes difficult!) savours. A sense of arrival and departure, the opposite of stasis, heart-lifting, tethered, anchored. Every contradiction contained, containable.