It is odd to connect the writing of this book to where I am now – with my sisters, about to meet all the people who brought this book from a Word document on my hard drive to a real book I can hold in my hand with pages that smell slightly of ink. The smell brings back the days when I was seven or eight, and I would go to work with my mother at the Times of India building, imposing enough to a child, but when a peon took me to the press floor, the smell of newsprint and the sounds of the machines were thrilling to me.

It is strange and wonderful that other people will read my words, however they react, and, however nervous and anxious and unprepared I am to do those other things that come with being a writer. I calm my nerves by listening to the fragile sound of peacocks meowing in the night and remembering elephants walking, unperturbed in the disastrous traffic of the capital city.