Jhumpa is a fiercely private person: Amitav Ghosh

Amitav Ghosh’s small cottage at Aldona village in north Goa is an ideal place where he wants to ‘conceive’. The author says that he chose the property carefully because it lets him ‘delink’ himself from the world. “I have this streak in myself that I have to be alone when I am writing; I can’t attend to people and phone calls. My cottage is in the interiors of north Goa amidst mangrove forests…just the perfect setting I wanted to write the next part of my trilogy,” says Amitav, whose Sea of Poppies recently won the Crossword Book Award 2008 along with Neel Mukherjee.

The author admits that there are times when his self-incarceration doesn’t work and these “terrible phases” of depression follow where he stares at blank sheets of paper. “I am very superstitious when it comes to writing. There has to be a particular pen (a Mont Blanc that he hides in his safe) and sheets of paper when I begin writing and I go through these phases where I freak out because nothing seems to come out of my mind. But I try to tell myself that it’s okay,” he adds.

Married to American author Deborah Barker, Amitav reveals that back in Brooklyn, New York, his neighbour was surprisingly none other than Jhumpa Lahiri. “We’d invite each other’s families over for dinner sometimes, but that happens occasionally since Jhumpa is a fiercely private person and doesn’t like to socialise too much,” he says on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. “Whenever I have met her, she talks about her kids (Octavio, 7, and Noor, 5). She keeps on telling me that her kids take up so much of her time now that she hardly has any time to do anything.”