Now that he’s thinking of Sacred Games in terms of a film, he recalls some of his favourite gangster flicks. Besides bro-in-law Chopra’s Parinda, he singles out Satya for praise. “It had well fleshed out characters and a narrative velocity that led you forward in the film and made you empathise with people you would normally think as very different. It was very succesful in its vision of the urban landscape.”

The Berkeley-based writer is sure of coming back to Mumbai to find his stories. “Just walk down its streets and talk to five people and you have five different stories… The other day I was travelling in a cab and the song Aye dil hai mushqil jeena yahan was playing in the background and I thought, ‘Perhaps this is the only city where we make an anthem of a song that actually says how hard it is to live here…’”