“Studying architecture and understanding space, how has that influenced your writing and your literature and understanding that part how do you think language and literature can help us understand our space?, because living in South Africa as an Indian who studied architecture, the way I grew up at home and understanding the way I understand space in my community is very different to the way that I was taught, is very different to the way we practice which plays a whole different sort of friction in the work space. So how do we start taking that sort of anti-colonial aspect of, of how we live and translating it into architecture and space and also moving forward and progressing?” – Question from audience
“So the question was about how architecture, the study of architecture affects the way I write and how the way I write could affect the way we look at space around us. You know when I studied architecture by the time I was in third year I began to be more interested in cities and the, you know we have the colonial part of the city, the medieval part of the city and the new modern part of the city in a place like Delhi and so my architecture thesis was about how cities came to be the way they are and what they do to those who live in it and the thing was how do the institutions in the city exclude the poor, you know. So there was a city for citizens and then there were the non-citizens who lived in the cracks between these institutions and I remember, of course I was like twenty years old then and facing a jury and telling them that you know that even the sewage system doesn’t belong to the poor because they shit on top of it and the jury was like that’s enough from you young lady.
