India, May 26 -- Your story, An Eye and a Leg, draws its readers in - grabbing their eyeballs - with its opening line, "When my eye fell out of its socket, I called for my mother." This surreal story is actually a pretty accurate depiction of a South Asian woman in her mid-thirties and the marriage market. Your narrator is, as her family doctor diagnoses her, "an expiring woman." The only cure is marriage which, has to be arranged through the marriage market, an actual place at a convention centre where women and their families gather for single men to come and pick wives. How and when did you start thinking about the story and this surreal realist form it takes, and when did you start writing it?

My entire life, really, I've seen marria...