Goodreads asked Pia Padukone:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Pia Padukone Karom, the main character of Where Earth Meets Water, narrowly escapes tragedy. He skips school when his class visits the World Trade Center on 9/11, he is late to get to a family reunion being held on the beach on the southeast Indian coast, when the tsunami strikes. The idea for a man haunted by these near misses when he loses loved ones came to me because I had experienced many of these myself.

I had been tempting in Tower One of the World Trade Center during the summer before my junior year of college. My last day was 9/7. I was standing on the beach just a few hundred miles north of where the tsunami crashed into the shores of the Indian Ocean. And my husband ran the 2013 Boston Marathon, during which I walked past the finish line and presumably past those backpack bombs to meet him at the family reunion area.

Luckily, I didn't internalize these near misses as intensely as Karom did, but they did spur the idea for the novel overall, making me consider my luck and the arbitrariness of these events.

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