Delhi Noir

About the contributors

Omair Ahmad is the author of a novel, Encounters, a novella, The Storyteller’s Tale, and a collection of short stories, Unbelonging. He studied at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University and has worked as a journalist and policy analyst.

Hartosh Singh Bal trained as an engineer and a mathematician before turning to journalism. He is coauthor of A Certain Ambiguity: A Mathematical Novel and is currently working on a travelogue set along the Narmada River.

Nalinaksha Bhattacharya has published three novels and some short fiction in India and the U.K. A civil servant by profession, he has lived for more than twenty years in R.K. Puram, where his story “Hissing Cobras” is set.

Siddharth Chowdhury is the author of Diksha at St. Martin’s and Patna Roughcut. He studied English Literature at Zakir Husain and Hindu Colleges in Delhi University (1993–98). In 2007, he held the Charles Wallace Fellowship in Creative Writing at University of Stirling in Scotland. He currently lives in Delhi and works in the publishing industry. “Hostel” is taken from his forthcoming novel, Dayscholar.

Radhika Jha, born in Delhi in 1970, is the author of Smell and The Elephant and the Maruti. She has received the Prix Guerlain and writes and performs Odissi dancing. She has also worked for the Rajiv Gandhi Foundation, where she started up the Interact Project to educate children of the victims of terrorism in different parts of India. She now lives in Tokyo with her husband and two children.

Ruchir Joshi, a writer and filmmaker, lived in Delhi from 1997 to 2007. Joshi’s first novel, The Last Jet-Engine Laugh, was published in Britain, India, Australia, and France to critical acclaim. His films include the award-winning documentaries Eleven Miles, Memories of Milk City, and Tales from Planet Kolkata. Joshi is now taking a break from Delhi and spending his time between Calcutta and London.

Tabish Khair was born and educated in Bihar, the Indian state that provides Delhi with much of its “migrant labor.” He has worked as a staff reporter for the Times of India in Delhi, and he continues to visit the city regularly. A poet, novelist, and critic, Khair’s latest book is the novel Filming: A Love Story.

Palash Krishna Mehrotra was educated at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi and Balliol College, Oxford. He has two forthcoming books — Eunuch Park, a story collection, and The Penguin Book of Schooldays, an anthology — and is currently working on a nonfiction book on India called Th e Butterfly Generation. He writes a column for the Delhi tabloid Mail Today.

Meera Nair grew up in five different states in India before coming to America in 1997. She is the author of Video: Stories, which won the Asian American Literary Award in 2003. Her work has been featured in the New York Times and NPR. She is currently finishing a new novel. Her earliest memory of Delhi is of a predawn bus ride. A fellow traveler, shaken awake, let loose a string of Punjabi profanities. He was about five.

Manjula Padmanabhan, born in 1953, is a writer and artist who lives part-time in Delhi. Her books include Hot Death, Cold Soup, Kleptomania, Getting Th ere, This Is Suki! and Hidden Fires. Harvest, her fifth play, won first prize in the 1997 Onassis Award for Theatre in Greece. She has illustrated twenty-four books for children including two of her own works, the novels Mouse Attack and Mouse Invaders.

Uday Prakash writes poetry, fiction, and journalism and is also a filmmaker and translator. He has published four collections of poetry, eight collections of short stories, and three books of essays. His latest work to be translated into English is a novella entitled The Girl with the Golden Parasol. He began living in Delhi in 1975 and stayed there until 2005, when he moved to nearby Ghaziabad.

Hirsh Sawhney has written for the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian, Time Out New York, and Outlook Traveller. His parents migrated from Delhi to New York in the 1960s, and he moved to the Indian capital’s Green Park area in 2005. He splits his time between Delhi and Brooklyn and is working on his first novel.

Irwin Allan Sealy is the author of the novels TheTrotter-Nama, Hero, The Everest Hotel, The Brainfever Bird, and Red, and a travel book, From Yukon to Yucatan. He is at work on a narrative poem set in Fatehpur Sikri, a conversation with the Mughal Emperor Akbar. Sealy is a graduate of Delhi University and lives in the foothills of the Himalayas.

Mohan Sikka currently lives in Brooklyn, New York. His story “Uncle Musto Take a Mistress” was published in One Story and won an O. Henry Award. He spent part of his childhood and teenage years in Delhi, where he lived in various railway colonies, including the one adjoining Paharganj depicted in his story “Railway Aunty.” Sikka is completing a story collection and planning a novel.