June Baptista is a hearing-impaired Kiwi author of Portuguese and Indian heritage. She writes literary fiction under the pen name Franciska Soares. This year Baptista published her first collection of poetry, Quiet Enough, charting her journey from the noise to the quiet, following her hearing loss. And, her second novel, A Smatter of Minutes (RRP $40, Cornest Publications) is out now.

Your novel is set both in Mumbai and New Zealand. Do you think it’s important to have spent quality time in a place before writing about it, and how did your time in India serve your writing?

I was born in India and spent more than three decades in that land of colour and festivals and temples and cows on the streets – the kind of setting that adds sound and fury to my writing.

I grew up on a street similar to the Gloriosa Street in my latest novel, peopled with oddball characters and strong women: the deliciously awful mealy-mouthed

Mrs DeCunha, the secretive Mrs Barbosa rumoured to have bullion buried in the foundations of her mansion, Mrs Castellino the shut-in who controlled her seven sons with an iron fist …

So the material was already there, evolving in a buried place and being metabolised by life. A Smatter of Minutes is my tribute to community, memory and imagination.

Where did the germ of the idea for this story come from?

If I wasn’t such a packrat of memories, I doubt A Smatter of Minutes would have seen the light of day.

During the lockdown, I found myself wandering inside these recollections and felt a powerful urge to process them through fiction. The young boy drowning in a septic tank; the istriwalla who lived under the stairs, his thinly-upholstered plank of an ironing board his bed; the Napier school boy strangled on a toilet window – these are all embedded into the narrative in the hopes they inject my fiction with a dose of authenticity.

Tell us how you write.

I try to write every day for two hours, preferably early in the morning because that’s when my creative juices flow.

Toward the end of a novel, hysterical to finish, I’ll put in perhaps seven, eight hours. I write seated on a couch drawing inspiration from the view through my bi-fold doors, watching the quicksilver choreography of the clouds draping

The Remarkables towering above the whitecaps of Lake Wakatipu.

The juxtaposition of the dramatic with an underlying permanence so reflects what life is all about, I feel, and I try to recreate that in my writing.

And are you working on anything else right now?

My next novel is populated by characters from 18th-century novels, forgotten on a dusty old shelf in a vast university library in Mumbai.

They take on a modern-day cannibalistic fanatic and a philandering English Lit professor. Hopefully the book, title and all

– I haven’t thought up one yet! – should be out this time next year.