``I modelled my way of working like a novelist would. I would not write, I would paint a diary,'' she says. Her work has been close to the print medium. The books she can't do without, Global Parasites by Winin Pereira and Geremy Seabrook and Tending The Earth by Winin Pereira, have deeply influenced her works. She based her series titled `The Mutants' on Pereira's findings about the earth. ``Tending... is about bio-sustainability. Global Parasites is a more angry book -- about dispossession, about how the colonial nations were robbed of their worlds. It's like a Bible for me,'' she says. Pakistani writer Sadat Hasanmanto's short stories fascinate her.

She has used his story Toba Tek Singh as a basis formany of her works. ``The story, to me, shows the absurdities of making boundaries.'' And the last book to feature on her top four list is Italo Calvino's The Invisible Cities. ``It's a crazy book; a fantasy, a conversation between Marco Polo and Kubla Khan, a plain dialogue that means the opposite of what's said,'' says Malani.