Food and sex have always been part of my novels, says writer Anita Nair

Anita Nair's Alphabet Soup for Lovers is a novel about an affair between a 38-year-old woman and an older male movie superstar. The latter, Shoola Pani (Ship), comes to live incognito in a remote plantation that belongs to Lena, and they fall headlong into love and lust. What saves the book from being a regular M&B is Nair's narrative structure. The chapters are named after the alphabets, each letter standing for a food item in Malayalam — A for Arisi Appalam, B for Badam, C for Cheppankizhangu and so on. Edited excerpts from an interview.

The romance genre is popular, but it's not taken very seriously as "literary fiction." Would you agree?
Different people read different books at different levels. That's how I see it. You could see Alphabet Soup as middle-aged woman-meets-middle-aged man romance. Or you could read it as a story about two people who have led their lives with the greatest calculation and then something wild happens and they completely disregard that life and go off, not knowing whether it will even last six weeks, let alone six months. I have always wondered what is it that a couple finds in each other that they're willing to risk everything.

I notice you leave morality out of the equation. Lena and her lover are both married and yet go off together at the end.
I don't believe in moral judgements. The righteous thing may not always be the right thing for you. I draw a line at paedophilia and bestiality, only because the animal doesn't have a say in it, but otherwise, anything between two consenting adults is fine.

How easy/hard was it to write about the sex?
A book of this nature needed sex. All my books have sex. I needed a reference point for the sex in this book — interesting, well-known sex scenes from movies. So the sex on the table is from The Postman Always Rings Twice. The interesting part was that Lena is constantly questioning Ship — is this gesture or a line from a movie or is he doing it naturally, instinctively. It was fun. My publisher and I were joking that many would buy the book for just these pages.

You depict a very close friendship between Komathi, the cook, and Lena. Is that taken from your own life?
My cook Rajeshwari, who has been with me for the last 25 years, is central to my life. Unlike Komathi, who's a free spirit, at least in her head, Rajeshwari is a very traditional person. But I wouldn't have been the writer I am without her — she frees me up. When my son was little, she was very hands on. My mum once told me, "she's spent more time with you than me." In some ways, I wanted to celebrate that relationship.

How did food come into the story?
My Italian publisher wanted me to write something on food and I said I couldn't write to order, it had to be something I feel inspired by. This love story had been in my head for a while, but I needed to do something that wasn't just a straightforward, happy story. I hadn't been able to write it because I needed to elevate it. That's how food came in as the narrator. And then it all fell in place. It was a strange amalgamation of various things, like cooking.