"As always, characters grow first in my imagination and they bring their stories with them. The Hero's Walk, curiously enough, did not begin with Sripathi Rao, unwilling hero of my novel. It all started with his mother and her determination to keep her daughter Putti with her for the rest of her life. At about the same time, I was wholly taken up with the idea of the 'hero' - both the epic and the silver-screen, larger-than-life varieties. After reading all that I could possibly read about these giant heroes, I realised that I actually wanted to explore the notion of the ordinary, garden-weed sort of person who bumbles through life hoping to reach the end of it all in a reasonable state of dignity. I wanted to write about the beauty, tragedy and the comedy of life. And the characters had to be the way we all are - brave, hopeful, ridiculous, and often plain horrible. Serendipitously, while I was tearing up my first draft and weeping tears of blood over it, a friend told me about two children in the US who had been abruptly orphaned and had to go to live with relatives in India. This became an important element in The Hero's Walk and became the connective tissue in a novel full of people trying to deal with violent change, loss, and displacement."; 0-676-97225-X

[BCBW AUTUMN 2000]