Omair Ahmad: Delhi Noir

Tabish Khairwas 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 Mehrotrawas 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 Nairgrew 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 Prakashwrites 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 Sawhneyhas 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 Sealyis 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 Sikkacurrently 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.