childhood memories

You have been travelling with your latest book A Country Called Childhood to literature festivals all over India. How did it feel to read excerpts from it and talk about it in Amritsar, the city where you spent much of your childhood and where this book is set?Coming to Gobindgarh Fort – this place where we are sitting together right now – is quite special for me. It has a direct connection to my childhood. As children growing up in 1965, when the India-Pakistan War was on, we had never seen this fort though we were…

You were born during the Lebanese civil war. When did you understand the gravity of it and decide to write stories about it? Graphic novelist Zeina Abirached (Courtesy the author) The Lebanese Civil War started in 1975, and I was born in the middle of it in 1981 in the eastern part of Beirut that was already torn into two by the demarcation line. Since I never knew anything else besides the war, I thought it was normal to grow up and live like that. It is only when the war ended in 1990 that I understood it…