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The Hindu : “They listened to music — without translation; raw, on the rocks.”From ‘Grateful Ganga’ in “The Japanese Wife” collection.Kunal Basu was born in Kolkata but has spent the last 29 years in Canada and the U.S. teaching Management Studies at universities. He has also been a prolific writer with three novels and a short story collection to his credit.If that background makes one expect his literary output to revolve around cultural conflicts and NRI angst reflected in much of the diasporic writing, one is in for a surprise. His last novel, “Racists”, was without a single Indian character. The 12 short stories in the just-launched collection “The Japanese Wife” have people crossing borders and striking relationships in the most unexpected ways: A Maths teacher at a school in Sundarbans marries a Japanese woman through letters. The wife of an American rock star falls in love with a Punjabi businessman of Karolbagh. And a jaded journalist in India suddenly starts getting letters from a young African woman who wants his help to trace her Tamil grandfather.Basu does not want the label of an Indo-Anglian writer and the expectations that come with it to cloud his writing. He says a story is born simply when an idea keeps him awake at night and he gets up to see if he can “fashion a tale around it”.MetroPlus caught up with Basu when he was in Bangalore to launch “The Japanese Wife” with Aparna Sen, who is making a film based on the title story.Excerpts from an interview:The stories in the collection are about situations where “accidents reveal more than the plan” as you put it.The stories are about unexpected things that happen to us within the humdrum of everyday life. The humdrum drowns them out, and yet, they remain with us as dreams and deep memories. In “Father Tito’s Onion Rings” whenever the protagonist is faced with a conflict…More