I came to writing purely by chance; it wasn’t considered a career when I was young. I was encouraged to study Science and ended up with a post graduate degree from the School of Life Sciences, JNU. Some years later, as a young mother with an active two-year-old, I found myself housebound; taking to pen and paper was the natural outcome for someone who wanted to engage in more than just reading. I wrote and posted a short story for children to a magazine. The editor responded by sending me an entry form for the National Children’s Writers’ Competition, conducted by the Children’s Book Trust. I wrote the first book, The Emerald Lingam, as an adventure story for the 9-12 years age group. (Looking back, I see a strong influence of the Enid Blyton mysteries of my childhood.) When it won the first prize in its category, no one was more surprised than I. When writerhood is thrust on a person, one doesn’t quite know what to do with it. In those days admitting to the fact that one wrote was tantamount to confessing a secret vice. The question I was frequently asked, almost accusingly, was: How do you find the time? For a long while, I believed, just as everyone around me did, that I was merely dabbling. Yet the dabbling seemed to produce results that were published: shorts stories to women’s magazines, middles for newspapers, story after story after story for all the children’s magazines that asked for contributions. My first book for adults was a collection of short stories, Paltan Tales (Indialog, 2006). It had 13 stories that drew that their themes from life in the cantonments, where, as an army brat, I had spent much of my growing up years. Doppelganger (Alchemy, 2014) is my second collection of short stories.