Anuradha Roy in conversation with Mihaela Gligor

All the Lives We Never Lived started with the idea of a boy who can enter pictures and live in their world – through his imagination. I wrote quite a few false starts with this boy and nothing seemed right. Then came my second visit for Bali, for the Ubud Writers Festival and a whole world slowly started taking shape at a museum there, looking at the paintings of Walter Spies. I discovered Tagore had met Spies during his travels; that Beryl de Zoete, who wrote a book with Spies, had come to India to write on dance.