India, Jan. 17 -- 1This was supposed to be a book about flowers in the Himalayas, your home for the last 25 years. But Called by the Hills contains many portraits from your world in Ranikhet. How did it come together? When I began with the book, I thought I would write only about the flowers. But. but. A line in Kiran Desai's wonderful new book (The Loneli- ness of Sonia and Sunny; 2025) describes exactly how my plans altered: "This was India. You might try to write a slender story but it inevitably connected to a larger one. The sense could never be contained." Once I realised my scope was going to be larger, it developed organically. The people connected to plants in my garden entered the book first. Yesterday, I was reading an essay by Emma Freud in which she traces the genealogy of a begonia cutting she is gifted, from one cutting to its parent, spanning times and places, many lives and many secaturs. She realises the original plant had belonged to her great-grandfather, Sigmund Freud. It is in a similar way that the people included in my book came to be in it. The narrative arc emerged gradually for me. I understood it after the first draft was done. I was talking to my agent Clare Alexander about it and she said, perceptively, "It's all about the dogs, isn't it?" When I got to work on the second draft, I focused on that. 2You write about taking copies of one of your novels to a hotel near your house, asking the manager to sell it to tourists. He took one copy, which didn't sell because he locked it up. Is your work really still as little-known in the town where you live? Surely some readers must have shown up enquiring about you at some point! The honest truth is that the readership for literary fiction in English is small, especially here. My new book about this town is non-fiction, so there is much more interest, but so far, luckily, people seem to respect my privacy and don't barge in. 3How does writing fit into the hard physical work of living in the mountains, the leisure and beauty of it all, the pottery you make, and the publishing house, Permanent Black, that you run with your husband Rukun Advani? It is a truth universally acknowledged that if you live in a hill station you must be on perpetual holiday! But when two people are running a publishing house, however beautiful the surroundings, there isn't much leisure. I enjoy all the work I do - the design work for Permanent Black, looking after its website, etc. So it doesn't feel like suffering. But it can get overwhelming at times. The writing happens in the middle of a lot of daily chaos and activity, and if I am at work on a book I am obsessive about it. I've always written, from before I knew how to actually write. As a toddler, I had notebooks full of nonsense. I don't think I've ever been without it, and couldn't be....