At the centre of the book is the re-election of the next Don against the background of property matters. Where did this idea come from?
I was born and brought up in Kalyan in a family of landlords and landladies, so the basic set-up of the story comes from that world. Everything else is distorted and exaggerated for the genre. The story draws inspiration from Goan culture and is meant to be tongue-in-cheek with its ‘Portuguese hangover’ (the nostalgic affinity some Goans feel toward the erstwhile Portuguese rule, the fascination with Lisbon, or the desire for Portuguese passports).

For instance, the Burgundy House is named after The House of Burgundy in Portugal, and is symbolic of an imaginary ‘Lisbon in Kalyan’, a grand, self-made citadel built by two powerful families, the D’Costas and the Josephs. They’ve created their own little empires far away from Bombay (now Mumbai), complete with hierarchies, capos, and self-declared dons. It’s not a mafia story. They are engaged in small illegal activities, inflated humorously to the scale of a Goan mafia — a playful nod to how people assert superiority within social hierarchies.