To Indira, to her playfulness and complexity, and to Saveria for being persistent.

To Armelle and Francois for their warm support.

To Sachin Deshpande for reading, and for guidance and encouragement.

To Christine Martin for her affection. To Kriston Chen for creative camaraderie.

To Tarini Uppal for her belief, enthusiasm and patience. She is also the brilliant editor.

To Trisha Bora for her rigorous copy edits and ruffling the manuscript much much. Thank you again.

To Sandhya Prabhat for the magic on the cover.

To my colleagues and friends for reading, critiquing and talking—Dini Parayitam, Gitanjali Kolanad, Andrew Hui, Gavin Flood and Elena Glasberg.

To Anju Paul, Kalpana Karunakaran and Risa Toha for always checking in and for support.

To colleagues at the Writers Group at Yale-NUS: Robin Hemley, Waqar Ahmed, Heidi Stalla, Justin Clark, Larry Ypil, and Michael Clark.

To Firdaus Azim and Gillian Slovo for encouraging the project with the Commonwealth Writers Short Story Prize 2016, to Lucy Hannah and Emma D’Costa at the Commonwealth Foundation for their support, and to Jacob Ross, for guidance. To Divya A (IIT Madras, Humanities and Social Sciences), Caroline Wood (Centre for Stories), Kwame Dawes and Justine Henzell (Calabash Festival) for their warm invitations. To Granta Magazine for publishing related short fiction.

To mentors, teachers, colleagues, and students at New York University, Mumbai University, and Yale-NUS College for a very long leash and for their support.

THE BEGINNING

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