An Indian Lit Primer, Courtesy of Salman Rushdie and Tishani Doshi

On Sunday, a line of rain-sopped literary types wrapped around the block to hear British-Indian novelist Salman Rushdie speak to Indian poet and novelist Tishani Doshi at Brooklyn's St. Francis College auditorium.

After an hour wait, the crowd finally shuffled in to shake out their umbrellas and hear the writers talk. The event, which was part of the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival, started off with remarks from Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz. His introduction got a round of applause in the name of Brooklyn pride.

When the conversation between Rushdie and Doshi began, the two authors discussed transcultural love affairs, and mining their family lives for fictional material, something which got mixed reception from their relatives. They also divulged that they preferred the old English names of their hometowns--Bombay and Madras--to Mumbai, where Rushdie is from, and Chennai, where Doshi calls home.

Bon Mots:

Salman Rushdie on his favorite book he's written: "The truthful answer is: I'm sick of them all. I don't read the books of Salman Rushdie. It's horrible enough to write them."

Tishani Doshi on her family's reception to her first novel: "That's the thing about having a writer in the family. It's terrible for the other people."

Salman Rushdie on how much of his fiction is autobiographical: "We live in a culture which believes in a way that fiction must be autobiography in disguise. So, of course, Nabokov must have been a pedophile and Kafka must have been a dung beetle in disguise."