By Yong Shu Hoong

Critics have long lauded the dexterous and fearless way in which Delhi-based Indian author Githa Hariharan has often tackled social and political issues in her writing. On her official website, she herself has admitted, "All my work looks at power politics in some way or the other. Both fiction and non-fiction have a thousand ways of giving us a new take on the dynamics of power relations."

Her first novel, The Thousand Faces of Night (1992), which won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 1993, was praised by India Today for showing, "with exceptional fictional skill, the subtle and everyday way in which women are bludgeoned to play male-scripted subordinate roles." In another review, this time of her 2003 novel, In Times of Siege, she was described as being "particularly concerned about intolerance and the attempts in India to reject its multi-ethnic identity."

Hariharan's other novels include The Ghosts of Vasu Master (1994), When Dreams Travel (1999) and Fugitive Histories (2009). Her other publications include The Art of Dying (1993), a collection of 20 stories of contemporary Indian life; The Winning Team (2004), a book of stories for children; and the book of essays, Almost Home: Cities and Other Places (2014).

Born in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, in 1954, she has been Visiting Professor or Writer-in-Residence in several universities worldwide, including Dartmouth College, George Washington University and the University of Canterbury at Kent. She was an NTU-NAC Writer in Residence (International) at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore from January to July 2015.

1. What are you reading right now?
I am between books, so it's a good time to catch up with reading. Also, one of the great things about travel is discovering new authors, new streams of writing. For a long time after my visit to Palestine, Algeria and Tunisia, I read English translations of Arabic writing. Now, with six months in Singapore, I am discovering several Chinese, Japanese and Malay writers, both those known in the West and otherwise. I have just finished Chang-Rae Lee's On Such a Full Sea, Tie Ning's The Bathing Women, Constance Singam's memoir of a life in Singapore, Ruth Ozeki's A Tale for the Time Being, and Dai Sijie's Once on a Moonless Night. And I am now in the middle of Empress by Shan Sa.

2. If you were a famous literary character in a novel, play, or poem, who would you be, and why?
Why would I want to be a literary character? I would rather write that character, and remain someone real.

3. What is the greatest misconception about you?
Misconceptions about writers in general, I guess. People assume you are always writing, always publishing, always getting advances. They assume you can write anytime and anywhere – when I broke a leg, everyone told me that being bedridden was a great way to write a book. Then there's the terrible business of having to hear everyone's "great idea" for a book – as if the problem with writing is lack of material.

4. Name one living author and one dead author you identify with most, and tell us why.
That's easy, except for limiting it to one. Italo Calvino, whose insight into travel guided my enterprise in Almost Home; and J.M. Coetzee, whose spare, austere prose and worldview gave me a notion of what I could aim for as a writer.

5. Do you believe in writer's block? If so, how do you overcome it?
The block is something all self-driven, self-bossed workers face. You just say it will get better the next day and keep going. Or you read some more, watch a film, go for a walk or see friends.

6. What qualities do you admire most in a writer?
In the text, a spare style that comes close to naming the unnameable. Language that is rich enough for play, ambiguity and political insights. In a writer, someone who is capable of living and laughing in a world beyond her own work.

7. What is one trait you deplore most in writing or writers?
In writing, exoticising our part of the world, too long the "other"; in writers, the idea that writing and politics live in different places.

8. Can you recite your favourite line from a literary work or a piece of advice from a writer?
On principle, no, because it reminds me of the classroom. I can quote my own advice, however. Read more, write more, talk less about it. Listen to everyone's advice, then take your own.

9. Complete this sentence: Few people know this, but I…
…actually learnt classical (Indian) music for many years…

10. At the movies, if you have to pick a comedy, a tragedy, or an action thriller to watch, which will you go for, and why?
A comedy after a hard or profitless day of writing; a tragedy after a happy day of work. Action thrillers? I prefer action and thrills in real life, not on celluloid.

11. What is your favourite word, and what is your least favourite one?
There are a lot of words I am partial to – off the top of my head, I can think of "lurk", "elliptical", "palimpsest". The ones I am allergic to, especially in real life, are like, "nice", "interesting".

12. Write a short-short story in three lines that include the following three words: "smoke", "merlion" and "bias".
That bias growing like a root in you, find it, pull it out, burn it to ash. When the smoke clears, consider the merlion lying still before you, a question in its eyes. The muscular tail of the mermaid, the lion with the limpid eyes – which one is man, which woman?

13. What object is indispensable to you when you write?
A take on power politics through the lives my characters live.

14. What is the best time of the day for writing?
Morning definitely.

15. If you had a last supper, which three literary figures, real or fictional, would you invite to the soiree, and why?
Borges, so we can see our last supper in a mirror and it goes on and on, and may well not be the last; A.K. Ramanujan, so he tells us all the "kitchen tales" that debunk the grand notion of the last supper; Eduardo Galeano, so he puts the supper, why we are there, and what comes after in context.

16. Some readers expect to be entertained. Some expect to find the meaning of life within the pages, while yet others expect writers to help change the world for the better. As a writer of fiction and non-fiction, how do you seek to fulfil (or resist) such expectations?
I have been a writer for a long time, so I am cussed enough to resist expectations. All I can do is use the writer's voice I have been blessed/cursed with. Readers who want to join me in the balancing act of a writer – play the game of "let's pretend" – will play along with the expectations the text sets up.

17. What would you write on your own tombstone?
She tried hard to find the right words.

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