The Firebird has flown back home, from Stanford to Ashoka. And with him, he brings flowers of flame with his new novel, to be published soon. Here’s an excerpt from the writer himself. From what we gather from this excerpt, the novel explores the queer relationships, which may not be so queer, and questions the queerness of the queer itself. The novel explores the borders overlapping borders between the geo-political, sensual, emotional and the cross zones of complexity. The game of Indo-Pak cricket, is not any less crucial than Indo-Pak wars, speaking volumes of the love-hate borderland, and the agony of the Abject desire. The writer explores: “Is ‘erotic’ just another word for ‘human’? Does touch, when haunted by sex, care about the other sex, that which assigns the world to different washrooms? Is the erotic a religion? How else can the spiritual come to us if not erotically? Such is the heart and gut of my new novel.”