Muted conversations, tinkling of wine glasses, dusk setting in saw the world-wide book launch of eminent writer, Vikram Chandra's much awaited third literary offering, Sacred Games, in Mumbai at the Hilton Towers' Rooftop. Early the next day, at the suburban Taj Lands End, Mumbai, a conversation enfolded with the award-winning novelist who surfaces in the world of words (earlier works are Red Earth and Pouring Rain and Love and Longing in Bombay) after a long sabbatical. I had to ask - why so many years before another novel - seven in the making. He replies with alacrity, "I'm just slow, very slow. It does take some perseverance and a large degree of obsession!" This trait is remarkable in the little man with precise and fluent thoughts and a great deal of patience. As the dialogue swirls around lengths and time, Chandra states that writers have their own best lengths. "I did short stories as an experiment," he says, "to see if they would work, but even those got really long! For me, long length is natural."

It becomes very clear that the California-based Chandra is, as one can tell from his writing, deeply inspired by Indian mythology, the epics and other magical tales. "What forms us when we are young and growing up, stays with us," is his strong belief.

Born and brought up in India, but having left for the States out of sheer frustration at not being able to find a good course in creative writing (when he followed poet, Nissim Ezekiel, around), Chandra did his undergraduate degree magna cum laude in English. He looks back and wonders: "Before going abroad, you live in your own parochial world and somehow think that you are universal; that you are like the person on the other side of the world. Once there, within the first couple of days, you realise that you are talking in different languages, even though everyone is supposedly speaking English!"

Since then, he has been studying, working and living in America, with frequent visits to the city close to his heart, Mumbai. As a professor of creative writing at the University of California, Berkeley, he finds the cross-cultural mingling stimulating and educational for both sides. He marvels at the rapid changes in India too, "The modern urban Indian is a very different creature from the modern urban New Yorker. In a world that's rapidly globalising and seemingly getting smaller, we are also fragmenting more and more and the polarities are growing more intense."

What is his concept of 'Indian', then? What we think of as 'Indian' is actually the result of many, many changes all through the ages, Chandra explains. He points out that to talk of an unchanging Indianness and the nostalgia for an unchanging past and subsequent stability is itself a falsehood. Brooding about the changing nature of society, Chandra insists that "the world cannot become uniform, even if it is a smaller place". He predicts an increase of the parochial and the local or an urban niche. "The seemingly contradictory thing," he says, "is that even as we become more modern, we become more tribal."

Chandra often and wistfully recalls the days when he and his friend, Anuradha Tandon started the adda in Goa Portuguesa, a restaurant in Mumbai, as a meeting ground for young thinkers and artists. He notes with some amusement that while the Mumbaiites would be dedicatedly taking part in discussions that went on into the wee hours of the morning, their American counterparts in DC, would rush off home by 9 p.m., since the next day was a working day. With barely concealed enthusiasm, he states, "It really was amazing and a lot of fun! That kind of cross-pollination and conversation is really helpful for all kinds of people - really good things came out of that."

With the turmoil prevalent in the world around, Chandra believes that in some ways it's a really good time to be a writer because there is so much turbulence and change. The material that is offered to you, that you come by - although it is often painful - is really rich. "In some sense, every book that I have written is a response to what is going on around me," he says.