‘The readership for literary fiction is small’

On her new book about living and working in the mountains, and on being unknown in her town

- Saudamini Jain

This 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 Loneliness 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.”