Cambridge-based author Saumya Balsari talks about being an outsider and South-Asian writers finding their voice

I was born, and grew up in what was then Bombay and left India 21 years ago; so I am British but would fail a Tebbit cricket test. During my teaching stint in Denmark, I have travelled widely within Europe, and to Asia, Australia and North and South America. I have lived in leafy Cambridge with my husband and two teenage daughters for 13 years.
I was recently introduced at an event as ‘a favourite Cambridge writer’. I have always seen myself as an outsider writing from the periphery, so the praise is astonishing.

To know one’s passion in life and to stay true to it and believe in it is a gift. I didn’t have it because I didn’t dare to dream. Drifting through several professions — translator, teacher, freelance journalist — it took years before I knew I would write fiction. 

On The Cat on the Wall:
I should have held onto my poem, The Cat on the Wall — but then, I should have held onto the hundreds of scribblings over the years. I once deleted 60,000 words of a novel with a single, deliberate, flick of the button. I am furiously catching up on lost time now, reaching into memory. A friend joked that I should insure my fingers — after all, JLo reportedly insured a nether part of her anatomy, but I have a greater fear of Alzheimer’s.

Inspiring authors and areas:
Writers who take their time to tell their stories are a source of comfort. Arundhati Roy, Ian McEwan, Nadeem Aslam, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, to name a few.

I desperately need and want time, endless time, to explore and craft fictional worlds. The Cambridge Curry Club was written in eight weeks of exhausting madness. I had to turn The Curry Club, a play that had a rehearsed reading at the Soho Theatre in London, into a novel. I hope I won’t ever have that kind of deadline again.

South-Asian women writers tend to address big issues such as gender empowerment and the tug of the modern against tradition. This is a recognisable voice but the danger is that it can become predictable, viewed solely as a voice of conflict and suffering, of ‘victimhood’. My own voice finds its expression in humour and irony. In this regard, I would like to say that no one does it better than Meera Syal, the British-Asian actor and author, who endorsed my book.

The Diaspora:
Difference in the Diaspora isn’t going to go away. To derive strength from a centred, unshakeable self within is often the best form of survival. In today’s world of global identities and loyalties and eco-political power shifts, we should begin perhaps, to look upon difference as an advantage, not as a reason for distress. Incidentally, on my recommendation, a Cambridge bookshop will serve vegetable samosas along with tea and English biscuits at my book signing next week. I now predict an enthusiastic word-of-mouth advertisement of the event. 

Future speak: 
I have nearly finished a novel about getting into Cambridge University. It is quite a challenge to capture the imaginative realms and idiom of teenagers whose entire vocabulary only seems to consist of two words — ‘like’ and ‘whatever’. I have had working titles such as “Cambridge Girls”, “The Taming of the Blue”, ‘In!’”. The title of my first book came to me right away and proved to be hugely popular, but the second title is elusive. There are a handful of agents keen to read it. I’ll decide where I want the book to go.

The new India has exploding energy. If it will let me near, I shall examine its  collisions with the present. Suketu Mehta and Aravind Adiga have done it their way. I have mine. I’ll write my third novel on India. In India.