‘Most of us are not comfortable with our bodies’

On writing a South-East Asian epic, his characters’ struggles to belong, and how shame and pride influence their choices

- Saurabh Sharma

The South was conceived as an 800-page epic, but you felt writing a book like that was “hypermasculine”. Such realisations often escape writers. How did you rethink the book as part of a quartet?

It was easy. When I first started writing what would become The South, I realised very quickly that I didn’t have the ego required to write a huge weighty epic, a very male kind of ego, which involves believing that you know how people intersect with history over along sweep of time; how history plays out and affects individual lives.