India, July 9 -- Your novel Cursed Bread was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. How did you learn about the mass-poisoning incident that is the subject of the novel?

I stumbled across it online. And I remember just thinking it was such an interesting story, so I just filed it away in my head. But I kept thinking of it. I think it was something about the idea of a mass poisoning - in the sense how quickly a town could just tip over from one state to another and how it affected everyone.

There's something very terrifying about it and kind of primal, too. While a really good straightforward non-fiction book could've been written about it, and there has been stuff about it, I didn't feel like I was the right person to tell that s...