“She was just supposed to be backstory, but once I had created Daya sitting on her bed, polishing her little silver teapot, there was no getting her off the page,” he says in an email interview with The Sunday Times. Aacho’s relationship with author Shyam Selvadurai is far more pleasant – she is the most complex female character he has attempted over his four books and one who is absolutely essential to his latest novel. In his grandmother, our narrator Shivan Rassiah, finds someone he both fears and detests her love for him an overwhelming burden he bears with increasing desperation and decreasing grace. Daya might be dressed in a butter yellow saree and pearls, but she wears them like battle armour – her pleats ‘starched to a knife edge’, her ‘forearms garrotted’ by gold bangles. The most interesting character in ‘The Hungry Ghosts’ is an old woman. Shyam Selvadurai of Funny Boy fame, discusses his latest novel, The Hungry Ghosts, in this e-mail interview with Smriti Daniel Weaving in Buddhist philosophy, autobiography and politics
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