Where were you born and raised?

I was born in London and brought up in Canada and in the U.S.

Where do you live?

Normally I live in Vancouver, but this year I'm the writer-in-residence at the University of Calgary.

What are you currently working on? Please tell me a little about it.

These days I'm working on a non-fiction project, a memoir called Spade Life. It's about the time I spent working as a tree-planter in the woolly Canadian wilds. As the cliche goes, it's a summer job for university students, but I think it's safe to say I met more immigrants and ethnically mixed people there than anywhere else in Canada.

What themes interest you?

Though I do enjoy writing non-fiction, my first love has always been fiction. For some reason I like characters who are torn between two courses of action or two ways of being in the world.

How does being South Asian affect your literary work?

Because of my dual ethnicity I suppose I'm acquainted with the role of the outsider. I love being Canadian, but I don't feel it my bones as an indelible fact of my existence. I don't feel totally Indian, either. Also, there's that second-generation sensation of homelessness or detachment. Not an entirely unpleasant feeling, more like nostalgia for geographic belonging. Maybe it's a craving for something that doesn't really exist.

Is there a topic or theme typically associated with South Asian literature that does not interest you? Why?

I enjoy South Asian writing like I love South Asia. There's so much varied territory to explore. I do tend to gravitate towards writers with "modern" takes on their subject matter--if I can say "modern" and get away with it. Bharati Mukherjee, for example, has never been shy about writing the traditional in a way that's fresh, ironic and even challenging from time to time. Hanif Kureishi is another old favourite. Gautam Malkani's more recent Londonstani is interesting as well.

What subject matter interests you and do you want to explore further?

I've always been curious about the way cultures intersect (and collude, and collide), especially within the household microcosm. How to distinguish between the personal and the cultural when we live in the New World? A funny example: when I was a child I could never figure out why my dad insisted on wearing a scarf around his head, like a sufferer of the mumps, instead of around his neck as North Americans do. Years later, a single trip to Delhi in the middle of January cleared up most of my confusion.

Have you ever felt reluctant to not write about South Asian perspective? Why?

This is very tricky territory. I may have a South Asian story in me, but if I start out publishing that way, will I ever get to write about anything else? The "ethnic" brand is such an alluring marketing category. It can be difficult to resist. But sometimes I wonder, is it fair that South Asian writers are expected to produce a certain kind of story--full of spices and mangoes, written in reminiscent, past-tense prose? This kind of narrative can be wonderful, but in some ways it stows the voice safely in another place and time. A novel like The Buddha of Suburbia, published nearly 20 years ago in the U.K., is more risky in its interplay of then and now, East and West. Perhaps because immigration is newer to Canada, we're just now catching up.

How do you define South Asian Canadian writers?

Some might consider this too broad, but I think if you write, then you are a writer. If you have South Asian blood flowing around in you, and you write, then you are a South Asian writer. If you are half one race and half another, then I imagine it's also a question of who wants to claim you.