I prefer to use the term 'transplant' here to 'immigrant.' My earliest memories of transplantation are associated with moving rice seedlings to a prepared field in my father's paddy plot. There's something caring and hopeful about that, a gentle uprooting and then a careful replanting by hand.

Associated with 'paddy' is Roddy Doyle's "Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha," about a precocious ten-year-old boy growing up in working-class Ireland, one of the first books I remember moving me to tears. (I can't now remember why.) Also, my introduction to the Booker Prize and literary aspirations: I was mainly interested in writing murder mysteries à la Agatha Christie before that.

Applying for an American citizenship in 2011, I was bummed that my (yet to be written) books would be excluded from consideration for the Booker Prize. That changed in 2013. When Radiant Fugitives came out later, I consoled myself: surely the only reason my book didn't make it to the long and short-lists was because we couldn't find a publisher in the UK!

The naturalization ceremony was emotionally hard for two reasons: One, India doesn't allow a dual citizenship so I had to renounce Indian citizenship, and Two, I had to swear an oath of allegiance more extensive than any natural-born citizen needed to, including an oath to bear arms in the defense of the United States which I couldn't bring myself to do.

I still reread Agatha Christie. And I still think her genius underrated. And I still hope to write a worthy murder mystery one day.

"Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" by Pierre Bayard contains a remarkable exposition of the techniques Christie used to manipulate her readers.

One of my regrets is that I never studied Tamil formally though growing up in Tamil Nadu. My early schooling was in an English-medium Anglo-Indian school in Tiruchirapalli which frowned upon speaking Tamil during school hours, a dictum I adhered religiously to as a "good student." I studied Hindi as my second language until 10th grade and later French (which was easier to score highly in our public exams). Since we spoke Urdu at home, I never quite became fluent in Tamil.

Thanks to India's colonial heritage these were some of the best schools available at that time. Mine was called Campion run by the Montfort Brothers. They required an interview when my parents sought admission for me in the nursery (equivalent to kindergarten). I was accepted even though I responded to a picture of a monkey ironically in Tamil ("kurangu").

My parents lived in Pattukkottai, a small town about a three-hour bus-ride away, where my father practised law and my mother started a nursing home, one of the first women gynecologists to do so.

This meant that I (and my two siblings) lived with my aunt (mother's sister) and uncle and their five children in a rented house a ten-minutes walk from school. Since my aunt was generous enough to take in children of other relatives as well, the house was always bursting to the rafters with children.

It was really a partitioned bungalow in a past British cantonment, essentially a 4-room tiled structure which leaked like the dickens during the monsoons until the landlord later agreed to undertake repairs. The children slept together in a row on mattresses spead on benches grouped together to serve as a wide bed.

I've never used the phrase "like the dickens" before, but it somehow appears appropriate here. It does not refer to Charles Dickens but could be a corruption of "devilkins."

An auto-rickshaw driver once commented my accent pegged me as a Tamil from Sri Lanka.

Other things I've wanted to be growing up: a magician, a mathematician, a detective, a choreographer, a singer, a musician, a visual artist, a poet, a fiction writer, an actor, a performer, a clown. Some of these I'm still working on, some I've given up on because I'm no good at them, some I still have dreams that someday, someday!

When I was twelve, I was gifted a book: 101 Magic Tricks. I spent the summer vacation practising, and at the end of it, put on a show for my family. The patter was the hardest. I blame my lack of follow-through on insufficient encouragement for me to continue! (Thanks family!) I still love magic shows, though, and regularly read books on magic and try an occasional hand at the easier card-tricks.

It's amazing how fascinating a trick can be even if you know how it is done. Mentalism tricks are my favorite, close-up magic second.

Magic can be art. See for example, "The Push" by Derren Brown, where he manipulates an ordinary person to commit appalling act. One day, I hope to write a novel with a character like him. I settled on writing, I think, so I could at least live many of my dreams vicariously.

One recent birthday, I asked my partner to take me to Asi Wind's "Inner Circle." It was one of the best presents ever.

The best was a trip up the Moana Kea for my 50th birthday. The view of the sunset from the peak was miraculous, as was our first ever gaze at the Milky Way.

I do feel guilty about the debasement to that sacred site of the native Hawaiians, with all those observatories and tourists. A visit to Hawaii is a painful reminder of imperialism and colonialism.

Growing up in India, Britain was the world's worst perpetrator while the USA appeared a beacon of hope and freedom. My father now says the world would be a better place if USA's powers were severely curtailed and I find it hard to present any counter-arguments.

What he really said was if the USA stopped poking its nose in other parts of the world. For my father that's a very mild way of expressing what he's really feeling.

My fascination with mathematics started, I think, with trying to generate all the Pythagorean triads. I spent my childhood scribbling proofs a la Ramanujan (I wish!) in various diaries. I thought I was good at math until I started attending coaching classes for the IIT Joint Entrance Examination. There I met many who were truly gifted at maths, and it was an humbling experience. I think their brains work along some other dimension of abstraction, and I could never hope to match that, so I reluctantly gave up wanting to be a mathematician. I still would like to understand enough math to follow Andrew Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem but sadly I know it's beyond me now.

Natural numbers a,b,c such that a*a + b*b = c*c, from Pythagora's theorem relating the sides of right-angle triangles. It seems very trivial now, but back then I was thrilled I came up with something similar to Dickson's method.

I feel uneasy calling positive whole numbers 'natural numbers'. It raises the question: what numbers are unnatural? Which bothers me since I associate the term with 'homosexuality is unnatural'

I'd learned that getting into an IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) was one way to get a ticket to the USA for graduate studies. I desperately wanted to get as far away from where I was because I knew no one gay around me. It was what kept motivating me to get back to work on the entrance examination. It consumed four years of my life.

I ostensibly chose Cornell University because it allowed you to enroll in a direct PhD instead of doing a masters first, but really because the CS department allowed you to choose a minor in unrelated fields. I ended up with a minor in Modern Dance.

I came out as gay at Cornell, thanks to the support of the LGBT center. Common Ground, the local gay bar outside Ithaca, was a welcoming first exposure to gay night-life. I also managed to find a small lovely community of queer South-Asians.

Later, when I moved to San Francisco, I lived for many years in the Castro, and gay bars abounded. On a typical night out, you could go back and forth bewteen three or more to catch the most hopping scenes. But what I miss the most, not living in the Castro anymore, are gay couples holding hands in public. Now that such neighborhoods are rare since so many have been degayfied (Chelsea I'm looking at you), I hardly seldom witness this most innocent form of gay intimacy.

I found a community in San Francisco. Trikone was one of the first organized queer South Asian communties in the world (founded in 1986), and it had its own community-run magazine which was a lifeline to isolated queer South Asians all over the world.

Trikone means triangle and its logo was an upside-down pink triangle with the Indian subcontinent embedded in it. The magazine was run in the home of the gay couple, Ashok and Arvind, who had founded both the organization and the magazine. Every time a new issue of the magazine was about to go out, the community would gather at their home to address and mail copies to its waiting subscribers. I admired the commitment and the courage it took, both from the editors and the contributors, to put something out like that at a time when homosexual acts were still a crime in the US (pre-Lawrence vs Texas, 2003).

Towards the end, I spent more time in the Dance department than in my own department. The department was very welcoming, despite the fact I was an absolute beginner and didn't then know my left from my right, since there were so few male dancers, the reason why I also got to perform in faculty and student productions.

The director of the Dance department created a minor especialy for me, for which I'm very grateful. She was also a dance composition teacher, which I was more drawn to, seeing that my dancing skills were quite limited. I performed a few of my own pieces in the small black-box theater, including my first public coming out piece Four Games for Two Men.

The problem with coming out is that it's not a one-time deal. You keep coming out again-and-again, sometimes to the same people, and it does become easier, but also tiresome.

There was never any mention of homosexuality growing up, except perhaps with respect to Martina Navratilova, the 18-time Grand Slam winner, and even she was dismissed at times as simply being "too manly". Which is why when I read "The Valley Of The Dolls" (as a late teen) which had the first ever young gay male character I came across in my reading, someone just opening up to their sexuality, I was moved to tears. I don't remember much else of the book, and I vaguely remember it doesn't end very happily for that character.

The correct term is butch-lesbian.

If there is one thing I'm good at it's to make multi-year plans and see them through. My novel