S.D.: There had been these two counterforces. For the Indian elite, it’s like, why do you wish to dig up the previous? This just isn’t essential, we have now embraced the brand new financial system, we’re an ideal energy, who offers a shit about Bhopal? Only outsiders such as you. That’s the elite docket. And then there have been the poor, the individuals who had been affected, who had been nonetheless struggling. They had conspiracy tales. They stated, this wasn’t an accident, this was deliberate, this was an experiment. At first, I wrote about it journalistically, in nonfiction, very matter-of-fact. And then for a lot of, a few years, it stayed with me, a wound I couldn’t eliminate. What if we had been to take each this stuff—the need to neglect on the a part of the elite, the conspiracy on the a part of the subaltern, the poor—and simply start writing? What if it was an experiment of some sort? Why not? It’s fiction—I couldn’t do this in nonfiction.

J.L.: The 4 protagonists every bear transformations that trigger them to query their loyalties—and in some circumstances, develop new, extra crucial, political consciousnesses. How did you consider the duty of representing awakenings?

S.D.: One of the keys to it for me is that my novel actually steps away from realism. It begins with very sensible moments within the subcontinent: the top of the world, which has been handled actually brilliantly by a whole lot of nice realist fiction novels, movies, in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, however I veer away from the realism. That’s the place the politics lies—within the uncanny. I’m not fully comfortable that is what I did, however that is what I felt I needed to do.