India, Jan. 22 -- You've been working on Kaveri, the main character of the Bangalore Detectives Club series, for over 15 years. How did Kaveri first come into your mind?

Much longer than 15 years, actually - around 18 years ago. I was sitting surrounded by a pile of documents on Old Bangalore, researching for my first book - Nature in the City. There were all kinds of archival documents like gazettes, proceedings, ledgers - and throughout that process I came across lots of fascinating little stories. Like, there was an incident in the Bangalore Museum where curator after curator would mysteriously die in the 1890s. I started wondering what happened. I was also pregnant at that time so I was ruminating a lot on questions about the future ...