I was looking for something that would help me break my obsession with stories that had very difficult endings. I was treading too much into tragedy, whether it was Shahid, City Lights or Aligarh. That being said, I have tried very hard to not go away from my core, which is making stories about people who are on the fringes of society. But in Simran the world is different. It is not Mumbai or UP. It is the US, but I call it the UP of the US. We shot mainly in the suburbs. When I was a kid, relatives would visit us from Australia, the US and Africa. Gujarati are all over the world. We had this fascination that they have these great lives. I remember writing to one uncle asking if I can come to the US and live there forever. We had this rosy picture until I visited those relatives and worked with somebody after studies. I realised this is a peculiar microcosm of society. They are still at the fringes, live in a very conservative world…in these ghettos, and most of them have set up home in far-flung areas. It was fascinating to study that life. They were doing migrant jobs but with a lot of dignity. So this is a migrant tale set in the US, but it is told in a light-hearted way.