He ended up staying in the city for a month, and returning over the following years. It was in the city that he met his wife, Anjum Hasan, also one of Bengaluru’s most noted writers. She’s also O’Yeah’s “first reader” before he publishes anything. Though they write separately, (O’Yeah describes his writing as starting at 4 am and ending at 4 pm), he says that a major benefit is that they always discuss their work with each other.

He says, “More than getting mixed up about our writing styles, it is about sharing the habit of going to the desk and just writing on until the book is done – which takes years so if one was alone, one might go crazy. Like, remember Jack in that Kubrick movie, The Shining? Writing can be a lonely job as one does have to do most of it alone, but being married to another writer makes it more fun as you have a colleague to talk shop with.”

O’Yeah describes himself as having still been a Swedish writer rather than a writer of Bengaluru or India in the early days. Though India does seem to have rubbed off on his early books – his 2006 detective novel, Tandooriälgen (republished later in English as Once Upon a Time in Scandinavistan) features the Swedish city of Gothenburg (colonised and renamed Gautampuri), depicting a murder involving victims grilled in a tandoor. On a rather different note, he also wrote a Swedish biography of Mahatma Gandhi.

The detective theme is something that stuck – as O’Yeah says, “Detective novels are something of a national hobby back in Sweden.”

He further says, “I eyed Majestic where I had lived as a backpacker all those years ago and which is a fun area of cinemas, bars, welcoming canteens catering to a floating population so you can get anything from Bengali to Malayali food… it somehow became ‘my Malgudi’.” This is best preserved in his Hari Majestic trilogy – featuring the titular detective (with delusions of heroism and more than a touch of criminality), in the back alleys and streets of Bengaluru, in an irreverent and honest portrayal of a city’s underbelly.

Another of his most recent books, Digesting India (published abroad as The Great Indian Food Trip), is an intersection of food and travel writing. As O’Yeah explains, “If there is one thread running through my life it is my love for food. And how Indian food taught me to understand the complexity of the country. It’s like, say, if you want to eat bannur mutton with ragi mudde, you go to somewhere near Bannur, or you might find a nice place like Ruchi Mess in nearby Mysuru that in my opinion does the best nati style food in the world, but you don’t go to Kolkata to look for mudde and mutton… So, in the book I look at the geography of Indian food, the culinary landscape that dictates what to eat and where.”

O’Yeah has also worn many hats over the years – for instance, in the 1980s, he worked with the noted Swedish synthpop music group Twice A Man. These days, he’s also part of another band operating online, The Ändå, which also includes Karl Glasleben from Twice A Man. Perhaps fittingly, as someone who has come out with a detective trilogy, his name is also a small mystery – he was not always called Zac O’Yeah. As he puts it, “People always misspelled my name and nobody anyway remembered it because it is too foreign, so I thought that to sell records and books I needed a name that nobody can forget. So then I thought of my favourite songs and remembered ‘She Loves You’ by The Beatles, where if you recall the chorus goes Yeah-Yeah-Yeah… Better than being called Zac Oh No, anyway.”

He also has increasing hope for literature featuring Bengaluru – via books such as Vivek Shanbag’s critically acclaimed Ghachar Ghochar, alongside detective fiction written by writers such as Anita Nair and Anuja Chauhan, and chroniclers and artists such as Paul Fernandes. As O’Yeah says, “There is still much left to be written and I’m happy if my writings in any way stimulated others to do more.”

O’Yeah also has a bit of parting advice for the up-and-coming young writers of the city, “Take a walk in your own neighbourhood and look at it with a writer’s eye. There is no need to go far for inspiration here, our city is great and there are millions of things in it that nobody ever thought of writing about. And it’s a way to discover and learn more about where one lives. And future generations living there will thank you for that snapshot of the past that you create. It is how I started and it worked for me, so it should work for anyone.”