Who is Edamarra Edwin and why does he get to frolic with the law?

There was a bit, which didn’t make it to the final version, where Anjali Mathur says Edamarra Edwin is a palooka who has bumbled into high tea. There’s probably some Cashel Byron to him, but none of Byron’s lustiness for life and love (or his skill in the ring come to think of it). You only ever see Edwin sizing up the schmoozers on the lawns from the cool, comfortable shade of indifference. So that’s who he is, I think: an inveterate outsider. Why does he get to frolic with the law? Really, who else will play with him that lifelong dank corner?

Is Big Law—your real life practice/playground—as fun and smart as the stories show it to be?

It has its ebbs and flows, but on the whole I’d say, ‘no’. Our conflicts are a lot more complex and their resolutions a lot less dramatic. It’s also a much harder life than the book portrays.

Which was the first story you wrote in Kill the Lawyers? How did that lead to an interlinked collection?

‘The stub’ was the first. The stories were written in the order in which they appear except that ‘The Way of the Land’ was written last.

I had set out to write a short story cycle so the inter-linkages were part of the original design. What took me a long time to get right (and I still don’t know if I have) was the dual arc. For a long time, the individual stories arced better than the collection as a whole. It took me two years of rewriting before I felt confident enough to publish.

Is Bombay crucial as a setting to the stories? Would they change if they were transferred to Delhi, for instance, or Bangalore?

I think so. You probably named those specific cities as examples, but they also happen to be the three cities in which I have lived at different points in my life. I was born and raised in Delhi. I worked there for a few years too. I read the law in Bangalore, and I have now lived and worked in Bombay for over twelve years. I don’t think the same stories can emerge out of these different cities.

If Edwin could have jimjams and tea with a writer, whom do you think he’d choose? (This is fantasy tea, the writer could be from any era and any part of the world.)

In law school, Edwin was enamored of Dylan Thomas as we know from ‘The Way of the Land’, so he’d probably ask for him. I don’t know whom he’d pick in his later life. Let me think about this.

Do lawyers naturally make for great writers?

Not as far as I can see. The practice of law beats the juices out, if you ask me, not to mention the horrors it inflicts on our English. It takes a steep unlearning to be rid of the clunky, cliché-ridden English that has such cachet among Indian lawyers.

There are great lawyer-writers, to state the obvious, but they often shine because it’s pitch dark around them.

Which classical writer would you identify with the most and why?

Flaubert maybe. I wish I could write prolifically like Dickens or Dumas, but I spend far too long labouring for le mot juste for that.