Kiran Desai is a study in contrast. Two weeks ago, she was a giggly speaker at the Jaipur Literature festival, marking each question addressed to her with little titters. When she was not chuckling, she was waxing eloquent about her mother, writer Anita Desai. And when she was not talking about her mother, she walked around the lawns with her partner, Turkish author Orhan Pamuk.

In Jaipur, you could see little of the writer who won the Man Booker Prize in 2006 for her book The Inheritance of Loss. Instead, you saw a daughter, a girlfriend and what seemed like a light-headed delegate to India’s biggest literary festival. But never judge a book by its cover — and an author by her appearance at a literary festival.

I realise this when I meet her days after the festival in the cool confines of a five-star hotel in Delhi. Seated across a mahogany writing desk at its business centre and holding a large mug of coffee, Desai, 39, is warm and receptive. Her freshly-scrubbed face with just a hint of lip colour takes away years from her age. But the seemingly naïve writer who made little impression on her audience in Jaipur is nowhere to be seen. Instead there is a mature young woman in front of me, choosing her words with care, and bemoaning the celebrity status that authors are increasingly being bestowed with.

“It’s rather sad that authors now have become bigger than their books,” says Desai, dressed in a pair of black trousers and sweater over an olive green top. “You are losing some of your solitude. But then, that’s the price one has to pay to connect with readers.” Outside the room, the queue of journalists waiting to meet her is growing.

Desai is worried about the media’s harsh spotlight on writers. So far she had constantly been drawn into comparisons with her mother, a three-time Booker nominee. And now there is another literary figure in her life. Her relationship with Nobel laureate Pamuk is no secret. She helped him with the translation of his book The Museum of Innocence and Pamuk has dedicated his latest book to her.

Yet Desai is reluctant to talk about the relationship.

“It’s quite personal. And it has been written about extensively in the media,” she says. “How would you feel if I ask you personal questions about your relationships?”

But she adds as an afterthought that she feels “lucky” to have a writer as a companion. “The solitude in the house when you know that the other person is also writing feels nice.”

But does having two heavy literary influences on her life affect her? “Yes, it bothers me,” she says, pausing to collect her thoughts. “It is tough on me when people talk of Orhan or my mom to me. It’s too personal for me to reveal their influence on me.”

When it comes to Anita Desai, however, the daughter is more forthcoming. “My mother has never intimidated me,” she says. “She read the manuscripts of my books at the last stage and just left a few notes as comments,” she adds. “I read them and did a serious amount of work,” she recalls.

Desai, one of four siblings, never thought she would pick up the pen to earn a living. “I was studying ecology in college and writing happened by fluke.”

Born in Chandigarh, Desai grew up in cities such as Pune, Mumbai and Delhi. At the age of 14, she went to England, and a year later moved to the United States. After high school in Massachusetts, she went to Bennington College in Vermont and then enrolled in a writing programme in Hollins University, Virginia.

“I may not have become a writer if I hadn’t moved out of India,” confesses the soft-spoken author. “Writing was an outlet to make sense of my fragmented life.”

Desai, who started writing her first book Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard while at Virginia, took a break to join Columbia University for another creative writing programme and then went on to finish the book in 1998. The novel won the Betty Trask Award of the Society of Authors for the best new novel written by a Commonwealth citizen under the age of 35. Desai then took another eight years, cooped up in her mother’s house near New York, to write her second book.

“I couldn’t have written if I had a different set of parents. It was scary when I started to write but I counted on my parents’ encouragement,” Desai says.

The Inheritance of Loss, set in the mid 1980s in a quaint hill town of West Bengal, revolves around the lives of an embittered old judge, his orphaned granddaughter, his cook and dog and the changes that a Nepalese uprising bring into their lives. Running parallel to the story is the tale of the cook’s son who struggles to realise his American dream as an immigrant in New York.

The book draws heavily from Desai’s life — her own immigrant status, struggle to earn a living as a writer and her half-Bengali mother’s unparalleled love for her dog. The story was set in Kalimpong, a town where Desai studied a semester at St Joseph’s School, where her parents built a house and where her aunt still lives. “I have fond memories of the place. I used to go there for my vacations,” she says.

Desai is proud to talk about her lineage. Her maternal grandfather was a refugee from Bangladesh and her grandmother was German. Her father — businessman Ashvin Desai, who died of cancer in 2008 — was originally from Gujarat, and her grandfather was educated in England. “The fragmented journey of mine, my parents’ and my grandparents’ helped me in getting an insight into what it means to travel between the East and West.”

She is at present working on her third book to be published by Penguin India. “It’s a mess in progress with 1,500 pages,” she confesses. Desai is peeved that writers often don’t look at their books as critics. “I write a new book to question my previous book.”

Curiously, the Booker Prize hangs heavily on her, almost like a millstone. “Before the Booker came in, my life was much more private. I was writing unselfconsciously. But now my own work fights with me. To write a good book is what frightens me the most.”

She confesses to being a lazy writer who gives her best in the mornings and evenings. “I need to take a break in the afternoon as my mind stops functioning.” And she still writes the old-fashioned way — putting thoughts first on paper.

“On paper you can create patterns, draw sketches; there’s an artistic bent to it which a computer lacks,” she explains energetically while making patterns in the air with her fingers. “Later I type out everything on my computer as it helps in editing.”

Desai is often asked about her identity and she stays clear of being labelled either as an Indian or American. She is yet to develop an accent and is happy with her dual citizenship status. She claims her writing doesn’t have a national identity. “Yet the sweetest compliment I ever received was after I won my Booker. A 90-year-old man came up to me and said ‘You made India proud’.”

She speaks effusively about the contemporary writers whom she can relate to. “Salman Rushdie is my public persona and V.S. Naipaul is my introverted style,” she says with a grin. “I have the creative energy of Rushdie and the immigrant’s heart of Naipaul.”

There’s a knock on the door. I have crossed the 40 minutes allotted to me for the interview, but Desai continues to hold forth. So I squeeze in my last question. What has the author been reading?

She takes a deep breath and addresses the query with what seems like a tinge of regret, “The last three books I read was to write the blurbs for them,” she says. “Publishers approach me all the time to write blurbs. People have helped me when I began and I too should not forget that,” she says.

Clearly, there is something different about Desai.