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Tag: fiction

Happy Valentines Day from Your First Love, Books!

Posted on by Penguin India

This Valentine’s Day, love thy neighbour, love thy friend, love this world, because love knows no end.

The day to celebrate love is here, and what better way than to combine your love for books and reading with lines of love from the best writers on the subject?

Here, we bring to you some of the best-loved quotes from some of our best-loved authors. Featuring quotes from new releases – such as The World Between Us by Sara Naveed, Calligraphies of Love by Hassan Massoudy, Dearest George by Alicia Souza, With Love as well as The Little Book of Everything by Ruskin Bond – as well as older books, we’re sure you’ll feel the magic of the day.

The World Between Us by Sara Naveed

‘I was madly, passionately and irrevocably in love with her, and I was ready to do anything to stay close to her.’

Calligraphies of Love by Hassan Massoudy

‘Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would
it be possessed;

For love is sufficient unto love.’

Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931) 

Dearest George by Alicia Souza

With Love: A Collection of Letters by Terribly Tiny Tales

‘You sent me a rose for every year we had been together, then asked me to marry you again. It’s annoying how you always one-up me every Valentine’s.’ – To Whoever Reads This by Shruti

The Little Book of Everything by Ruskin Bond

‘No words heal better than the silent company of a friend.’

Love Like That and Other Stories

‘That kiss changed everything for me; it brought about some sort of a chemical, biological change, and I knew I could never be the same person again. The gentle winter breeze changed me, making me forget the girl that I had been, and the kinship that I felt for Rahul, borne out of a constant companionship, had transformed in a matter of mere seconds into love.’ – Thirty Days to Live by Ira Trivedi

Can Love Happen Twice by Ravinder Singh

‘Love, like life, is so insecure. It moves in our lives and occupies its sweet space in our hearts so easily. But it never guarantees that it will stay there forever. Probably that’s why it is so precious.’

I Too Had a Love Story by Ravinder Singh

‘On my computer screen

Gazing at her picture

I found myself falling with the rising heights

Falling in Love with her

Couldn’t resist saying—I love you

The madness added

When the picture said it too’

Love Among the Bookshelves by Ruskin Bond

‘I hereby confess that I am in love with books, and bookshelves are good places to keep them, if not hide them.’

World’s Best Boyfriend by Durjoy Datta

‘That’s the cliché about love. You don’t choose it. It chooses you.’

The Boy Who Loved by Durjoy Datta

‘Unlike then, now we know time’s running out so we don’t hold back on words. We tell each other we love each other more freely, without feeling shy, we hold each other’s hand more tightly, we clutch each other with more authority, exercise more control over each other.’

The Boy with a Broken Heart by Durjoy Datta

‘”You have what no one else did in the family,” I heard Manish Chachu say. “You had the courage to love and be with the person you loved. We are all cowards but not you.”‘

Will You Still Love Me by Ravinder Singh

‘Love will happen again. You have to be open to it. In our times, love followed arranged marriages.’

Love Will Find a Way by Anurag Garg

‘There was confidence in her voice. “I love appreciation. It helps me connect to the source of a person, sometimes even their heart. Like they say, beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, so I love to connect with the beholder’s eyes, not the beauty—the source rather than the observation.”‘

The Girl Who Knew Too Much by Vikrant Khanna

‘I always thought love was a game. You got to win it. But love is not a game. Love is sacrifice. Love is letting go. And above all, love is dreaming the impossible, like bringing back a dead man.’

Ninety-Seven Poems

‘And that’s when I learnt that we have types of love.

There’s an
I love pink, I love dogs, I love fries type of love.

An I love books, I love coffee,
I love smiles type of love.

There’s an ‘I love this song’ type of love.
There’s an ‘I’d really love to kill you’ type of love.

And then . . . there’s the different type of love.’

-a different type of love by Jenai Dalal

Half-torn Hearts by Novoneel Chakraborty

‘Rare men give the rarest kind of pain and the rarest kind of pleasure. When you love a rare man like that you are proud to be a woman in a way that is also rare.’

Wish I Could Tell You by Durjoy Datta

‘Karishma said, “I really loved him at one point. I really, really loved him. Sometimes when I look back and think how devoted I was to him, I feel surprised. We are capable of so much more love when we are younger.“‘

She Friend-Zoned My Love by Sudeep Nagarkar

‘Sometimes we expect a lot from others because we are willing to do that much for them.’

The Secrets We Kept by Sudeep Nagarkar

‘Love can make a person do things he would never have contemplated doing before. A boy who couldn’t write an essay for an English examination was writing an apology letter to woo his beloved.’

Love Knows no LOC by Arpit Vageria

‘You showed me that there’s beauty even in the darkness as long as there’s someone who truly loves me. I’m glad to have you in my life. Mere words cannot express how much I love you.’

Something I Never Told You by Shravya Bhinder

‘All I can say to you is that just because of something which happened in the past, do not stop believing in love, do not stop looking for love, do not stop loving . . .’

House of Stars by Keya Ghosh

‘My father keeps telling me that I am too young to even understand what love is. I keep telling him that Romeo was sixteen and Juliet was fourteen. I think grown- ups forget what they were like at our age. They don’t remember that they knew love.’

In My Heart by Nandana Dev Sen

‘“After I came out of your hearts,
did your hearts become small again?”

“No,” said Papa. “When you come out of someone’s heart, a part of you always stays in it, making it even bigger.”‘

Across the Line by Nayanika Mahtani

‘A dull ache throbbed in her heart. A yearning for something that should have been hers to hold and love but which she now knew was not to be. All she felt was an emptiness. A clawing, hollow emptiness. And then, everything went dark.’

Which one will you be picking up this Valentines Day?

Heartbreak, Sadness and Vampires

Posted on by Penguin India

Love isn’t easy like Sunday morning. Seventeen-year-old Gehna Rai has normal friends, goes to normal school and belongs to a normally dysfunctional family. Everything about her is normal – except for the fact that she is also going to be a mom.

Erma is a nerdy high-school drop-out and dreams of becoming a poker pro. He also takes care of his dad, who has Parkinson’s disease.

Meet our latest favourite millennials in the excerpt below!

 

Gehna Rai was a girl who flirted with sadness.

She was tempted by it the way a person with vertigo sometimes feels drawn to the edge. It free-floated around the periphery of her days and she was aware of it following her always. When she was younger, and didn’t fully understand its nature, she would turn to meet it and it would squeeze her heart, seeping into her bones like a cold fog. In those days Gehna was optimistic: she believed that the sadness was a mood and, therefore, that certain distractions—like listening to music or going for a swim—could make it go away.

Wiser now, Gehna was no longer sure that she had any say in the comings and goings of the sadness, but she still held hope of ducking it. She had drawn strict boundaries, drip-feeding herself the pop songs about heartbreak and the tragic movies she loved, never exceeding a ratio of one part sad to nine parts happy. She stopped watching historical docudramas on the Holocaust and got Eram to screen her books before she agreed to read them.

‘I don’t get it,’ he had said the first time she asked him, shuffling through the pile of new books on her desk. Gehna was sitting on a floor cushion as far as she could from the books while still being in the same room. ‘You want me to tell you what happens in the stories?’

‘No. I want you to tell me what doesn’t happen.’ Eram steepled his fingers and nodded intelligently. ‘Right. It all becomes clear to me now. You’re saying, read the books and tell you what doesn’t happen in them.’ He lifted, with his thumb and forefinger, a book from the pile. ‘Now, this, for instance. Ian McEwan’s Atonement. I haven’t read it but I can tell you—just judging from the cover, mind you, and the fact that it was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2001—that vampires don’t happen in it. No vampires at all. Or exploding sheep. It doesn’t enlighten us on the dark and bloody past of shipping insurance. Also, it only touches on the oral sex techniques of the natives of Bora Bora but doesn’t really—’

‘Stoppit,’ Gehna cut off his riff. ‘Like, children dying. Or nice people. If any children or nice people die in a book, I don’t want to read it. You know what I mean.’

Amidst the quirkiness, author Arjun Nath gives us some very heartfelt moments like these to remember.

Caught between a sincere friendship and something more, Eram and Gehna give us a story that is #litAF!

Writing a Superhero(ine) Novel

Posted on by Penguin India
By Rajorshi Chakraborti

About two years ago, I found I wanted to write a superhero novel!

I was no doubt influenced by the wave of superhero movies and shows that has been such a dominant trend this past decade. I’m susceptible to influences of that sort: my wife points out that if a character picks up a glass of whisky in a show we’re watching, I often pause it and announce I feel like one too.

 

But then I encountered resistance, from within! The (mostly) realist writer inside me, who had been looking at the world in certain ways over the past six books, couldn’t so easily make the switch to all-conquering superheroes. So, with some regret, I realised my heroes wouldn’t be all-conquering, that the structures and systems they would battle would be enormously powerful, more entrenched and multifarious than any individual baddie. I also understood, without any regret, that this book – like several others of mine – would take place in locations I knew well rather than anywhere fantastical, beginning with my home city of Calcutta, and in a time period that I genuinely wanted to explore – the present political moment in India.

This is how Shakti was conceived – as a coming together of a part of me that wanted to experience for the first time the boundlessness of unleashing magic and superpowers in a story, and the part held down by gravity, by the boundaries of the plausible and the ‘real’. So, my challenge became – could the book be both? Could Shakti be read and experienced as a gripping ‘supernatural’ mystery thriller, and also work (hopefully) as a complex evocation of what it feels like for a range of different characters to be living in India now – in the India being remade at all levels by the many stunning transformations of the past few years?

 

Of course, I had models, the most incredible, inspiring models. From the great fables, fairy tales and myths that I most adored, to the Ramayana, the Arabian Nights and the Mahabharata, to modern works such as Midnight’s Children, Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, The Handmaid’s Tale, and One Hundred Years of Solitude, as well as sci-fi, horror, ghost stories and some of the more memorable superhero narratives, magical, non-realist elements have been used throughout literary history to shed new, unique light upon the real. In these unsurpassable works, and this was my hope as well on a far humbler scale, a few fantastic ingredients act as keys that allow the writer, and readers, access to richer, deeper, more breath-taking and soul-stirring apprehensions of the actual. How do certain extraordinary experiences feel to people in their impact and their unreality? How might any of us respond if one or other impossible-seeming thing became true tomorrow? What if you found yourself trapped in a body or a society that rendered you completely powerless (as in The Metamorphosis and The Handmaid’s Tale respectively, or perhaps under the regulations of the NRC)? What if all the forests around your town were burning and the sky was an unremitting red (which is true of several places in Victoria, Australia as I write)? What if you were granted powers that ​promised to​ realise your deepest longings, but they came at a terrible, soul-destroying price (the premise of Shakti)?

 

At the very start, I knew my principal protagonists would be women. It was an instinctive decision that only felt more right when I reflected upon it. First, I hadn’t written a novel before that was entirely narrated by and centred on women protagonists, which seemed like something imaginatively overdue to attempt. But also, when I thought about the most challenging circumstances into which I could plunge my would-be superheroes – to see what would remain, or emerge, of their humanity and heroism – the journeys of several women characters from different backgrounds in an Indian setting offered an incredible range of possibilities. Speaking as a male writer, I await eagerly reactions from readers to this crucial aspect of the book, to the experiences and histories of Arati, Jaya, Malti and Shivani, my principal characters, and whether they feel true and moving to you.

 

Before concluding, I’ll confess something I’ve felt ever since I completed Shakti, that – proud as I remain of all my other books and the things each one tries to do – it is this novel I have been building up my entire career to write. The one in which I’ve tried to do the most; the one packed with the ingredients I most love. ​The one whose title I was pleased to an embarrassing extent to notice one day had been hidden in my name all along – RAJORSHI CHAKRABORTI – as if waiting for me to arrive at it. ​

 

There’s always the temptation when using magic in a narrative to make wishes come true – the writer’s as much as a reader’s – of happy endings and fulfilled dreams. I love many such tales myself​; note my showing off how Shakti is ​’concealed’ in my ​​name! I wish one existed that we could all believe in about our present age. For its protagonists too, Shakti dangles precisely such a vision of the future, before reveal​ing​ itself ​to​ ​be ​the other kind of magic story – that involves wicked masters,​ binding conditions, crimes and servitude, and offers no way back. The kind that throws up moral crises no superhero cannot overcome by their powers alone. Collective crises, in the case of Shakti, which no hero can overcome alone.

 

Here’s what I hope for my book, beyond the wish that people will really enjoy it. That, in a very small way, it’ll offer ​a recognisable reflection of some of the crises millions of ordinary citizens in India – and in other countries around the world that are experiencing comparable political moments – are currently heroically fighting.

 

Heartbreaking Lines from Layla and Tanya’s Story

Posted on by Penguin India

A richly atmospheric, deeply claustrophobic story with a stunning denouement, of two women confronting the everyday realities of their city and country, So All is Peace by Vandana Singhal provides an unflinching insight into love, lust, fear, grief, and the decisions we make, through a cast of sharply drawn characters brought together by an unspoken wrong.

Here are some powerful but heartbreaking lines that stayed with us long after we had turned the last page:

‘…it made me have an epiphany that that is how my life was going to be; its beauty forever marred by ache, its moments of ecstasy shadowed by agony. I was wrong of course. My moments of happiness reached a point and snapped off. Just like that. Never presaged and never returned.’

*

‘That’s Tanya. She was always beautiful, always a better person, always by my side to make me stronger… But when I begin speaking again, the words stumble and lose direction and fall out as droplets of water. Ok. Perhaps I am not ready to speak yet. In time, but not quite just yet. Or perhaps never.’

*

‘All I feel is pain. Unmitigated, unending pain. Like a loud horrible keeeeeeeee of a faulty microphone inside my head. And cold. I am always so cold that I seem to be discovering new parts of my body that are developing little icicles inside them.’

*

‘His restlessness despite his otherwise structured life as a successful award-winning journalist probably comes from the complete lack of emotional support that he received from his parents throughout his life and although it feels a little juvenile and unfair as a thirty-seven year old man to still attribute his lack of emotional depth to his parents, what is undeniable is that they could be from another planet for how much he understood them or how much they have ever understood him.’

*

‘It is difficult to feel unique when there is another person who looks exactly like you, mirroring your every expression, replicating your every action, even if the replicator is as good looking as Layla often is.’

*

‘The spaces for women have been systematically, methodically truncated. Not by any dictate. That would be too obvious…No, there no boards saying ‘Women not Allowed’. But open a map of Delhi and there they are. The many, many places where no woman can go and the many, many more places where no woman can go after sundown. A temporal and areal-shrinking of their boundaries.’

Full of memorable characters and poignant scenes So All is Peace is a crucial commentary on the emotional realities and heartbreaks faced by women in today’s cities.

What Really is ‘Happily Ever After’?

Posted on by Penguin India

Sanam is a carefree, but headstrong young girl. A spat with a politician’s son pushes her to take up the challenge of becoming an IAS. At the same time, a small-town boy, Aamir, is nudged into studying for the civil services too. Both become rank holders.

They meet at the IAS Training Academy, Mussoorie. They fall in love and all hell breaks loose. Their religious differences come to the fore, things take a dangerous turn and there is an explosion on social media.

Meet the ambitious Sanam in an excerpt from the book below!

Life has a way of changing things around you with blinding speed, and in a way that you have little choice but to adapt to your new circumstances. Even a smiling sunflower basking in happiness could be dragged under the harshest spotlight the very next instance and whacked to answer questions that burn its yellow tongue. Our Sanam became one such bakra.

Not that you would’ve ever thought that possible, seeing the level of comfort and confidence with which she rode.

Two ‘Best Student’ trophies took pride of place on her desk—the one that had been awarded the previous day at college dwarfed the one presented at school four years ago, in sheer size. A figurine of the Laughing Buddha in onyx reclined next to them, guaranteeing both luck and prosperity.

The biggest challenge for Sanam today was to airbrush her Europe trip itinerary in such a way that she could squeeze out the maximum from this much-awaited time out to spend with her friends.

Two days in Lucerne . . . or just a day trip to Jungfrau, with an extra evening in Innsbruck? Sanam shakes her head. There are no easy answers in life!

But wait! Wasn’t there someone whose biggest preoccupation in life was to make the tough easy for her!

‘Dad!’

Sanam sallies forth to seek the one person who with his magic wand could iron out every crease and wrinkle in her way.

‘Dad!’ she calls out. The television news blared louder than her . . . her call drowning in the reporter’s excited outpouring:

‘Eight people have died as thousands of Dalits took to streets across India, protesting a Supreme Court order that, according to them, undermines a law designed to protect lower-caste and backward communities. Train services have been severely affected and main roads are blocked in a number of states . . .’

Grabbing the remote of the gigantic electronic screen that held her dad spellbound, Sanam reduces the volume.

Two pairs of eyes and ears swivel towards her immediately.

 

A heady mix of dreams and desire, Trending in Love is a story of undying love in the face of our society’s most dangerous beliefs. Are you all set to meet the couple?

 

Novoneel Chakraborty on his Inspiration,Characters & More

Posted on by Penguin India

Novoneel Chakraborty is the bestselling author of fourteen bestselling thriller novels and one short story collection titled Cheaters. Known for his twists, dark plots and strong female protagonists, Novoneel Chakraborty is also called the Sidney Sheldon of India by his readers.

His latest book, Roses Are Blood Red is sure to excite his fans! Here Novoneel answers some of your burning questions:

What inspired you to write Roses Are Blood Red?

The story stemmed out from a very personal experience of mine which pushed me to dissect the concept of ‘love’ in my own manner.

How or Why did you choose these characters?

Unlike my other books, this time I wanted to focus on people from smaller cities and towns. Hence, I chose characters whose overall emotional make-up had the vibe of such a place. I find some earthiness in them and hence are always close to me as a creator.

What could be an alternate title for your book?

I have no idea. I don’t think I ever had an alternate title for this book[Roses Are Blood Red]. Maybe the readers who have read the book may answer this.

What are three reasons to read this book?
  1. It’s a page turner.
  2. It talks about a kind of love you may have not read before.
  3. It has an endearing heart and love story at its centre.
What are you working on next?

It’s too early to talk about it but it’s a one of a kind thriller.

Did the climax of the story change or did it remain the same from the start?

The climax never changed. In fact, this was one of those books whose climax occurred to me before the story. So I chose to stick to it.

Author of the hugely successful Forever series, Novoneel Chakraborty creates a spellbinding story of love, longing and loss in his latest book Roses Are Blood Red.

To find out whether destiny triumphs over a dangerous obsession, read Roses Are Blood Red!

The Bane of Each Other’s Existence- An Excerpt from ‘Pataakha’

Posted on by Penguin India

They cannot live with each other, they cannot live without each other. As children, they squabbled all day long. When they were old enough, they married two brothers, and took with them their feuds to their in-laws. Boisterous and fiery pataakhas, sisters Badki and Chhutki are the bane of each other’s existence.

Based on Charan Singh Pathik’s eponymous short story, Vishal Bhardwaj’s adaptation is a hilarious tour de force that obliquely and mischievously takes into its ambit notions of patriarchy and diplomacy between nations. This translation, which includes the novella and the screenplay that the film-maker developed from the short story, not only brings to the reader a rustic, elemental tale rooted in the soil, but also provides a unique glimpse into the art of adapting a literary work into film.

Here’s an excerpt from the book below:

Badki’s husband dropped her back to the village after buying her medicines. Although Badki religiously took her medicines as prescribed, she found no relief even after the stipulated three days. Badki’s husband brought her back to the city. This time he showed her to a specialist who ran a battery of tests.

‘I can’t find anything wrong with these results,’ said the mystified specialist. ‘Let me prescribe some other medicines, however. Come back to me after five days.’

Badki flounced out of the doctor’s cabin in a huff and her embarrassed husband ran after her. She turned on him furiously. ‘What kind of a quack is this guy? He knows nothing. How in the name of the devil will he treat me?’ And with that she returned home, deeply annoyed.

At night, she said to her elder son, ‘Call your cousins in Agra. I want to talk to your maasi.’

The soldier, who had just come home from work, answered, ‘Hello, who is this?’
‘It’s me . . . Golu.’

‘Yes, Golu. Tell me . . . is everything okay?’

‘Everything is fine.’

‘Is budhi-maa okay?’ he said, referring to his mother; all the kids were used to calling their grandmother budhi-maa or ‘old-mother’.

‘Yes, she is. Please give the phone to maasi. Ammi wants to talk to her.’

The soldier handed the phone to Chhutki. ‘A call from home.’

Chhutki snatched the phone. ‘I’m Chhutki. Who is this?’

‘It’s me . . . Badki.’

‘Idiot! Why this urgent need to talk to me?’

‘Did you see the Red Fort and the Taj Mahal?’

‘May you suffer, dari.’

‘I’m already very unwell.’

‘You’ll die suffocating,’ Chhutki retorted, unsympathetically.

‘Did you sit in the aeroplane?’

‘Don’t you dare talk, witch! I’m also unwell. Agra’s water doesn’t suit me.’

‘You left me behind to go gallivanting with your husband. You had to pay, so pay!’

‘You’re a monster from another life, dari!’

‘And acting like a lioness just because you are at a safe distance, you hedgehog! If you have any guts, and are a red-blooded man’s daughter, I dare you to come to the village and face me . . .’ Badki challenged again. ‘Trying to behave like a soldier’s wife from far away!’

‘I’ll be back in two days, dari . . . and then see if I don’t grab your braids, twirl you around and hurl you a hundred yards out! Then you’ll know whether I’m the daughter of a red-blooded man or not!’

The soldier was dumbstruck to see the transformation in his wife. She seemed to have instantly thrown off the wan, sickly air that she had been carrying for days now.

Upon hearing that Chhutki was due to return in two days, Badki immediately switched off her phone.

That night she devoured several rotis and polished off a double helping of milk and rabdi. The next day she tossed out the packet of medicines. She announced, ‘It has been ages since I slept as well as I did last night.’

Will things go too far between Badki and Chhutki? You’ll have to read Pataakha to find out!

A Friendship Set in Stone

Posted on by Penguin India

In Sarojini’s Mother, Sarojini-Saz-Campbell comes to India to search for her biological mother. Adopted and taken to England at an early age, she has a degree from Cambridge and a mathematician’s brain adept in solving puzzles. Handicapped by a missing shoebox that held her birth papers and the death of her English mother, she has few leads to carry out her mission and scant knowledge of Calcutta, her birthplace.

Through an emotionally intense journey of survival and mental demons – Sarojini discovers how the concept of motherhood is much more nuanced than simple biology.

Chiru Sen, an Elvis lookalike, becomes her guide and confidante on this journey. Find a glimpse of their first meeting in the excerpt below.

 

It was easy to spot Saz at the Rex. She was sitting by herself near the window. At first glance she looked Indian, but not fully so, given the way she was flapping the menu around awkwardly, troubled by the flies. She nodded when I mentioned Idris and pointed to the seat across from her. Then she gave a start as I grabbed the menu from her hand and swatted a fly that was about to perch on her half-eaten croissant.

‘Did you have to kill it!’ She scowled; eyes fixed on the dead fly.

‘Not unless you wished to share your meal with it!’ Shrugging, I tried to lighten the air.

She didn’t speak to me for a good while, kept her eyes locked on my face. From her puzzled look you could see she wasn’t expecting Idris’s friend to resemble a rock star. ‘Why do you dress like a dead man?’ Saw asked.

Right away I knew she was special and why Suleiman was bent on saving her from being spoilt.

‘The King isn’t dead!’ I joked.

‘Really! If he was alive, his hair would’ve fallen out by now. Would you have shaved your head then?’ Regaining her composure after the fly incident, she returned tot he croissant, taking small bites and chewing thoroughly.

Words came to my lips, but I kept them closed hoping to hear some more from Saz.

‘Or are you hoping he lives on through you? Like we want our parents and grandparents to keep on living forever.’

I wasn’t expecting philosophy straight up, I have to confess, not before we had discussed matters of hygiene at least. Like the condition of her flat and toilet and the owner’s demeanour, whether she had managed to acquire an Indian SIM for her phone, and stayed healthy from her travels.

Finished with her meal, she avoided the Rex’s yellowing napkin and took out a pack of tissues to wipe her lips. Then she cut into my thoughts.

‘It isn’t all bad to imagine we are somebody else. Especially if there is confusion over who we really are.’

She appeared calm, and the words coming out of her mouth were crisp and clear. Much as I was prepared to strike up a Geordie, a Brummie or a Cockney, her English was clearly BBC.

‘Especially if we aren’t sure where we’ve come from, or where we belong?’

It was my turn for lofty talk, and a chance to impress my new friend. ‘Which is…’

‘Which is true for half the people on this planet!’ She took the words right out of my mouth, ‘like the two of us—you a Bengali Elvis and me a brown Saz Campbell from Bromley!’

Smart girl!—I thought. She was playing my role, out of the wings and joining up two strangers with nothing more than a few chosen words.

Did I want a coffee of the cinnamon tea she’d ordered, Saz asked when the waiter came around. I shook my head. It was too early in our friendship to have her buy me refreshments. ‘A croissant perhaps?’ She smiled, pointing to the menu and keeping it out of my reach to avoid another unnecessary killing.

I wasn’t expecting Suleiman’s ‘girl’ to be a stunner, but her smile was quite extraordinary. The eyes are the most revealing, they say, but in her case it was definitely the smile. Dressed Western but Indian in looks, it made her out to be her own person unattached to a place of birth or home address.

The bestselling author of The Japanese Wife is back with an intimate look at human connections, friendships and family.

Saz, Chiru and his band members set off to help Saz look for her birth mother. Will they be successful? Find out in Kunal Basu’s, Sarojini’s Mother!

Perils of the City: Everyday Realities of Urban

Posted on by Penguin India

So All Is Peace is a story of twin sisters – Layla and Tanya, who were anointed the ‘Starving Sisters’ when they were found to be starving in an upper middle class gated apartment complex in Delhi. Their news became instantly sensational and nobody could figure out what had caused two educated, beautiful women to starve themselves.

Here are some excerpts from Vandana Singh-Lal’s book, So All Is Peace, that highlights the feelings of alienation that the girls experienced while living in a big city.

 

Living in Delhi, Layla and Tanya were taught to avoid places where women felt vulnerable to inappropriate glances. Tanya remembers,

“With our carefully controlled outings with Mamma and Papa—shopping only at the malls, going to school in the school bus and to college in university-special or U-special as they are called; never going to any religious festival or a fair or any place where there may be crowds and the potential for a stampede (which was almost every place in Delhi)—our experience of groping fingers and lascivious glances was almost non-existent and we entered the territory that came with being a woman in Delhi or perhaps anywhere in India, unprepared, naked and woefully unarmed.”

*

Soon after their parents passed away, Tanya recalls an incident when feelings of loneliness gripped her, and she couldn’t discuss her harrowing experience of sexual assault with anyone around.

“Like sparks flying out of a short-circuit, it spewed out stray thoughts that I had nobody to share with, pieces of conversations that I could not have, bits of passages that nobody was present to hear, tears of sympathetic neighbours that had no place inside me, whispers of curious onlookers that I could not hide away from, the buzzing and sparking and searing and the absolute emptiness of a house where every room was still filled with the paraphernalia of the living but where everything had died.”

*

With Tanya relocating to Andhra Pradesh, Layla started dating Deepak. He often came to their house because,

“In a country where everything takes place outside in the open, where people bathe, eat, pray, sleep, shit, fight, play, kill and die on the road, the only thing that does not and that cannot happen on the road is love; the making of it, the display of it, or even the allusion to it, except in the larger than life film posters. But the posters too remain coy, allegorical, metaphorical. No kissing is allowed on the roads of the country, no holding of hands, no looking for too long into each others’ eyes either. So Layla had to find a place for them to meet and a relationship; a veneer however thin or translucent or unconvincing.”

*

Raman, the award-winning journalist, who has been tasked to write about the ‘Starving Sisters’ had begun to have strong feelings for Tanya.

Although he had spent relatively short time with her in person, he had devoted long hours to her mentally, analyzing the smallest of her gestures and the tiniest of inflictions in her voice ad-infinitum, and something in her had suggested a kind of depth that he was not used to encountering. Now he has been provided with some more clues about what exists behind her vulnerable tarsier eyes, and he is excited. This is a new challenge. And yet. Wouldn’t it have been easier if she did not have this other side? If she could have been enfolded within the narrative that was furiously being woven about her with the help of disparate threads—some real, most imaginary—but all being accorded the same amount of space and value as if the difference between the fake and the real does not matter anymore as long as everything could be fitted into an easily explained, easily propagated, easily digested world.

*

The gated societies of Delhi often have Residents’ Welfare Association (RWA) that have rules for visitors, especially males. When Deepak had moved in with the twins, Layla was regularly pestered by the head of RWA – Mr. Deol, to submit Deepak’s identity documents. Mr. Deol explained,

“We made the rule that we could not allow any overnight male visitor in any all-women household until they handed over his passport copy and gave us in writing what relationship they had with the man. I personally went to tell the sister that and to give them a copy of the notice. You know, the sister had looked at me very strangely then.’”

Pick your copy of So All Is Peace, to read how the shocking events unfolded in the starving sisters’ lives.

Meet the Characters from ‘Jaipur Journals’

Posted on by Penguin India

Jaipur Journals is a unique, metafictional novel by Namita Gokhale, one of the founder-directors of Jaipur Literature Festival. Set against the backdrop of the festival itself, the book brings together a rich cast of characters and their even richer stories.

We introduce you to some of the characters whose lives intersect and collide within these pages.

 

Zoya Mankotia

A writer who identifies herself as pan-sexual and non-binary, Zoya Mankotia is an icon of queer literature and representation. Her most recent novel, The Quilt, created waves, occasioning both outrage and intense appreciation. Her voice holds a mélange of accents.

In the world of Jaipur Journals, we meet her in a panel, where she introduces herself:

‘I am by discipline a novelist […] as passionate about crossover genres as I am about gender fluidity. I am nonbinary and pan-sexual, and I am committed equally to my writing, my raison d’être, and my wife, my monogamous partner. We can be who we are, write as we like. Sexuality, as a narrative, is a freeflowing river.’

Raju Srivastava

Born in Bijnor, Raju Srivastava is a burglar who is passionate about poetry. He is the son of an unsuccessful tailor-master. He arrives in Jaipur to fulfil two purposes: meeting India’s greatest poet, Janab Javed Akhtar, and covering the cost of the trip through some well-executed burglaries.

Raju nurses a deep-seated desire to become a poet, and is an avid reader of poets like Nirala and Dushyant Kumar, Muktibodh and Firaq Gorakhpuri and Faiz Ahmad Faiz. He writes prolifically, and his preferred form of poetry is the ghazal. His hero and idol in the poetry world, however, is Javed Akhtar.

Anura

Anura is short for Anuradha, a twelve-year-old student en route to Jaipur on a school trip. She is a prodigy, having been selected for a Young Adult panel in the Jaipur Literature Festival. She has self-published a dystopian novel.

As is evident from her preference for the shortened form of her name, she is quite taciturn, and likes to save her words for important things.

Anna Wilde

Anna Wilde is a writer from America, who primarily publishes books on meditation and reflection. Anna is quite renowned for her association with the Beat Poets, especially Allen Ginsberg. She is attending the Jaipur Literature Festival to talk about her books The Inner Eye, which was very successful, and The Third Way, which has recently been reissued.

Anna teaches theology at the University of Colorado. She calls herself a Hindu, by ‘dharma and karma’, and has spent many years in India before returning to America.

Rudrani Rana

Rudrani Rana is a woman in her seventies, who sees herself as a ‘failed novelist’. She always carries around a handbag that contains her unpublished magnum opus; which she refers to as UNSUBMITTED.  The novel is actually titled The Face by the Window and is a dedicated to Alice Walker and her book, The Colour Purple.

Rudrani is an alumna of Waverly Girls School in Dehradun. Alongside her unpublished semi-fictional novel, she also writes anonymous letters as a means to express herself.

She is a huge fan of Oprah Winfrey, which is what had drawn her to the Jaipur Literature Festival for the first time, back in 2012. She is often fatigued and lonely, and feels like an outsider within the literature circuit at the festival.

Gayatri Smyth Gandhy

Gayatri Smyth Gandhy is fifty-two, single, divorced and is a self-proclaimed ‘citizen of the world’. She is a  historian and cultural anthropologist with an American green card.  She is also an aspiring novelist.

She is stuck in her novel, struggling to understand herself what it is about. She lived in Jaipur as an adolescent when her father Brig. Gandhy was stationed there. She considers herself a Jaipurite in many respects, and makes annual trips to the city during the festival. She often feels divided between her Indian and Western selves.

Namita Gokhale’s Jaipur Journals  brings together these characters within the setting of the Jaipur Literature Festival, and their stories are as vibrant and diverse as the largest free literary festival in the world!

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