This book turns the spotlight on Parsis, a community, which hasn’t been written about much in conventional literature. Why did you decide that this is a community that you wanted to write about?
For me, each of the books in the Bharat series is an exploration of overlaps... overlaps between history and mythology, philosophy and science, politics and culture. Frankly, over the years, I’ve been fascinated by the overlaps between the Zoroastrian and the Vedic elements. The Zoroastrian yasna are very similar to the Vedic yagya. And the overlap between Avesta verses and Vedic Sanskrit is incredible. Other than inflection points, you could read the two as same languages... the commonalities within religions, and religious beliefs, have always fascinated me. And this was one of those common points of overlap.
At the centre of the thriller is the production of an anti-viral drug. Was this idea in any way inspired by the experience of living through the pandemic?
It was. When I was writing this novel, anti-Covid vaccines were still in the initial stages. And then, the very first vaccine came out, and the company in question was making ridiculous demands from countries in order to provide them with the vaccine. That is one of the reasons why this idea came to my mind. I wanted to talk about private versus common good, particularly in the world of pharmaceutical research.
You’ve written seven books in the Bharat series, which are all a mix of history, mythology, thriller, religion. What makes you keep coming back to this genre book after book?
What really interests me is the osmosis between various thoughts and ideas. Like I said in the beginning, the Bharat series is inspired by overlaps, and any overlap between elements of mythology, philosophy, theology, anthropology, science or even politics, interests me. But, I don’t ever claim to be a historian, a theologian, or a scholar. I’m simply a paperback writer who’s attempting to spin a good story. But what I hope for is that maybe I might have certain observations, which can lead to mainstream research happening on those topics.
The narrative, be it science, history, or even crime are exceptionally detailed in your books. So, what kind of research went into Magicians of Mazda?
The Magicians of Mazda started out with just simply a reading list, which is normally what happens with most of my novels. I always start with a reading list, and then hopefully some of that will eventually
be pointing me in different directions.
All of your books in the Bharat series, except The Rozabal Line, have alliterative titles. Was it done consciously?
What happened actually was that The Rozabal Line was not meant to be part of the series. It was only from the third book (The Krishna Key) onwards that we began to take a series approach. And because Chanakya’s Chant worked well, I thought to myself when I was writing The Krishna Key that why don’t we use an alliteration again. After that, it was a no brainer. For every book we ended up doing that. There were a couple of books where I deviated from that, but my publisher asked me not to break the pattern.