In Yalo, the tenth novel by Lebanese writer Elias Khoury, is such a book. Published in Arabic in 2002 and now available in a translation by Peter Theroux, Yalo is set in 1993 and revolves around a single consciousness unable to make sense of itself or its surroundings. Its opening sentence is “Yalo did not understand what was happening,” and its closing line is “And if I don’t find the end of the story, how will I be able to write it?” In between lies a work that is both one story and several, perpetually revised under the torque of history, memory, desire, fear, understanding and loathing.

But there is another kind of collaboration, one harder to categorise, and that is with publishers in the west. Writers working in English find that being read in India is still an after-effect of being published in Britain or America, in spite of the growing body of literature in English that is being published initially, or even exclusively, in India. Publication in the west has always been crucial, right from Graham Greene’s intervention on behalf of RK Narayan around the time the Progressive Writers’ Association was being formed, but it became a noticeable phenomenon only when the presence of Indian writers in the west began to coincide with other global trends: the increasing interest of the west in India as a market and the desire of a rising Indian elite to flaunt its affluence on a global scale.