Take the genesis of The Everest Hotel. "I did a watercolour before I wrote the novel," says 47-year-old Sealy. A pair of feet propped up, the mountains in the distance, and a clear divide in the intervening spaceāa green graveyard on one side, a grey-and-black auto workshop on the other. "So all I knew was there would be an old man, a division between the old and new India. But characters keep popping up. It's very fanciful. This book was an exercise to see how I could drift...constructively."
But why adopt a Kalidasa-inspired seasonal framework, why limit oneself to a one-mile...

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