The author of 'Kleptomania', artist, illustrator, award-winning playwright, printmaker, novelist and children's author, Manjula Padmanabhan gives us a glimpse into aspects of her work

Kleptomania' begins with a very shocking incident in the first short story. Do you write to shock?
Not consciously. I don't say to myself, 'Okay, I'm going to knock their socks off! What shall I choose as my weapon?' Everything depends on what the story's intention is. In the title story, 'Kleptomania', the intention was to explore the various meanings of that word. I didn't find it particularly shocking.

The daily newspapers are bursting with stories many times worse than what happens in that story - and unlike my story, they're true! So I am a little astonished at the reaction. Recently, for instance, there was a story about an 18-year-old girl who was thrown off a train, by her mother and aunt, because she was pregnant. She survived, but lost the baby, which would have been illegitimate had it survived. Every day, there is something horrific in the papers. So is my story shocking? Not if you read the newspapers.

In this collection of short stories, you range from human interest, to science fiction, to murder mystery. What is it that triggers off your imagination?
This collection includes stories, which were written for a variety of reasons. When they're looked at together, it seems as if I've been hopping around, but they represent thoughts and ideas collected over at least the last 10 years. Most of these stories were commissioned - meaning that I was asked to write a story for specific magazines. I have lots of ideas sitting in suspended animation in my 'Mental Idea Closet'. The choice of which one to bring out depends on who has asked for a story, and what length that story can be.

How do you make the transition between all your professional pursuits?
I really only do two things - I write and I draw. I don't do anything besides these two things. I don't cook or drive or look after a garden or socialise. And I usually work at a very slow, leisurely pace. If you consider the fact that I am half a century old - I have not accomplished very much in these fifty years. Being a cartoonist and illustrator came before being a writer.

It's often been observed that there is a cruel side to humour and that many cartoonists/humorists are actually not light-hearted in person. I don't think I am a light-hearted person and through my cartoons, I used humour for channelling the rough stuff going on around me. I make deliberate choices to a certain extent but I also tend to take the path of least resistance. I do whatever is easiest for me to do - I don't set out a ten-year plan and then meet my targets one by one.

When you write, are you interested in characters or in situations?
My ideas usually present themselves as set pieces, situations and characters combined. I think of ideas in the same way as butterfly collectors think of their targets - things that have their own independent existence until I catch them and pin them down. Sometimes it takes quite a struggle. Unlike butterflies, ideas are quite robust beasts, with many trailing tentacles and dangly bits. The struggle consists of getting all the bits pinned down in proper sequence, and arranged coherently so that the end result makes sense to others.