What made Pankaj Mishra turn to fiction after a gap of two decades?

Out with a novel after two decades, Mishra tells Ritwik Sharma that fiction may be able to tell the important truths far more than fact-based narratives

Nobody can perhaps appreciate work-from-home better than a solitary writer. As we log in on Zoom, Pankaj Mishra enquires where I stay and where my office is. Then he says I must be happy to be working from home. I smile.

I am meeting the essayist and novelist over tea/coffee: tea for me late afternoon in New Delhi; morning cup of coffee for him in London. His second novel, Run and Hide (Juggernaut), which hit the shelves recently, whetted my appetite to pick the author’s brains about how we’ve arrived in the India of today. Run and Hide portrays the transformation of