I need to see the best and the worst in people, in anything for that matter. Nothing is off the table, nothing is sacred and nothing is profane. At the core of this journey is awareness, perception, and understanding.
I receive, I absorb, I become. Writing then is an empathetic response.
This Garden of Weeds
Salil Gupta and his daughter Nupur belong to a Delhi business family that has no acquaintance with art. He wants to collect art, she wants to be a curator. But the art world is a walled garden that does not admit outsiders easily. Father and daughter shake up the auction business and make up a reality show set around the lives of chosen artists. It carries a million-dollar prize. Who can resist the lure of big money for wilful behaviour on camera?
The Mumbai art scene takes centre stage. In contention for the prize are a bohemian artist whose drug-filled existence fuels her art, an artist duo out to engineer a social upheaval, a performance artist who is a career rebel, and the daughter of a framer fighting conservative forces. As the contest heats up with participants going all out to win the million dollars, matters hurtle to a fatal denouement.
A tart-sweet delight of a novel, This Garden of Weeds is a witty and expert defenestration of the incestuous art world.
Bloomsbury India I 288pp I PB I Rs. 485
Ruffled Feathers
The "Forecaddie" won the first prize in Birdport Prize for Short Story in 2018.
An old man is suddenly able to curse to death those who annoy him. An English speaking thief has long conversations with his tied-up victims. A forensic accountant becomes obsessed with bringing down dodgy start-ups. An online troll suspects he is going to be shot dead for his political views.
The stories in Ruffled Feathers attend to men and women making their way through a grim world filled with sharp corners. But they do so with the deep tenderness and wry amusement, exquisitely balancing absurdity with pathos.
Bloomsbury India I 196pp I PB I Rs. 359
A Tamil Month
Tamil Nadu – where there are more temples than pharmacies, where the language is older than Sanskrit, where atheists have ruled for half a century provided they were atheists from the right caste. Tamil Nadu, where the young population is ripe for a revolution.
At least this is what Nanban thinks, coming from the hub of Mumbai and well-versed in its Machiavellian political ways, he plans to shake things up. His meeting with Veerappan Gounder, who took a bit hit in the last election, seems like his chance to challenge the Tamil status quo. Together they embark on a campaign where no ideal is too high and no action too dastardly to get what Nanban wants – but at what price.
V Sanjay Kumar weaves a political thriller as compelling as it is incisive, about the human factor and the vested interests that spark change and about an Indian state which is older than time and just as stubborn.
Bloomsbury India I 273pp I PB I Rs. 599
The Third Squad
Karan is an expert sharpshooter who never misses his mark. He belongs to a police hit squad formed to only commit encounter killings. All members of this squad fall somewhere along the autism spectrum.
Karan, who has been diagnosed with mild Asperger’s syndrome, is notorious for his ruthless precision and efficiency in carrying out these assassinations. But gradually even his impenetrable façade begins to crack. He has a difficult choice to make: should he continue to blindly follow orders from his superiors, regardless of their moral standing, or should he take matters into his own hands and do what he believes to be right?
Juggernaut I 294pp I HB I Rs. 399
Virgin Gingelly
I hope to be remembered in this street, amongst the lame, as the husband of the one with amorous thoughts and sexy legs.
‘There used to be a writer here in this empty house,’ they will say. ‘He had a porous mind.’
A stubborn writer struggles with his stories in a city that has been encroached. The last bastion is an urban agraharam near Mylapore where a bunch of misfits perform a strange kutcheri. Among these are existential street dogs, short-changed lovers, disgruntled housewives, runaways with bombs, veshti-wearing elders, and nihilist teenagers coming to terms with their sexuality.
With a singular desire to escape, these characters visit each other’s stories creating a layered narrative of loss and ennui. In language both gritty and humourous, and often surprisingly poetic, V Sanjay Kumar’s narrative, set in modern middle-class, housing-cooperative Chennai, tackles the simple conundrum of being and belonging.
Bloomsbury India I 196pp I PB I Rs. 359
Artist, Undone
'I can see where you are going. Up shit creek...with a paddle.' He was right. That is where I was going. It was the kind of thing that my analyst had always warned me against: 'You are at an inflexion point, in a mood to do the irrational and the irreverent.' He forgot irreversible.
Harsh Sinha - 'Fat, F**ked and Forty' - is so moved by a painting bearing this name and a compelling likeness to him, that he spends a large chunk of his life's savings on it. Announcing a year-long sabbatical from his advertising job in Mumbai, he returns to Chennai to his wife and daughter, determined to spend quality time with them. Sadly, his wife Gayathri no longer wants him; she is more interested in the artist next door. The artist, Newton Kumaraswamy, is an inveterate womanizer and a famous thief - his every work an ode to that acknowledged master, Francis Newton Souza. With no job to turn to, and no family to lean on, Harsh returns to Mumbai to let himself freefall further into the seductive world of contemporary Indian art and artists... Sharp, rough, and written with biting candour, Artist, Undone is a beguiling narrative of one man's understanding of the creation, the commerce and the critiquing of contemporary art. It is also a montage of lives changed - mauled, redefined and occasionally redeemed - by it.
Hachette India I 240pp I PB I Rs. 450