The new bestseller from PBI – India’s biggest selling novelist
A bittersweet love story for the Nineties
It seems like the perfect match. Maya is pretty, young, eager to escape her dull, middle-class home in Calcutta and plunge into the whirl of Bombay, where she moves after her marriage. Ranjan, handsome, hard-driving and ambitious, has all the glamour of an American university degree and a wealthy family background. Maya is determined to be the ideal wife. Instead, she finds herself trapped and stifled by the confines of an arranged marriage to a man who, she discovers, is rigidly conservative and completely PBI – Indifferent to her desires. She begins to experience, too, the utter loneliness of a stranger in suburban Bombay.
And then she strikes up a friendship with Nikhil, her charming, college-going neighbour, and the stage is set for an explosive tale of love, betrayal and paths not taken.
Garv Roy Gill and Yahvi Kothari meet at an airport lounge by chance. Six months later they find themselves consumed by the proverbial once-in-a-lifetime kind of love. Bored with their mundane daily routine, their adventurous streak makes them decide, one day, to escape the present and begin a new reality somewhere far, far away. Just that the day they are supposed to meet and escape, Yahvi doesn’t turn up. Then she doesn’t respond to Garv’s phone calls or messages. And mysteriously Yahvi vanishes altogether.
Days later, as a grieving Garv stumbles upon her Instagram profile, which he didn’t know existed, he is shocked to realize that her every post is probably a clue to the truth behind her disappearance. Except, the more he unearths the meandering truth, the more he learns about a certain side of Yahvi which changes the way he saw her. And the way he understood love.
Cross Your Heart, Take My Name is a beguiling tale about urban loneliness, fickle relationships and our need for companionship as depicted by the twisted journey of two individuals, caught up in their own emotional plight, blurring the lines between crime and sin.
Set in regions of great natural beauty where Kamadeva, the god of love, picks his victims with consummate ease, these stories and lyrics celebrate the myriad aspects of love. In addition to relatively well-known works like Kalidasa’s Meghadutam and Prince Ilango Adigal’s Shilappadikaram, the collection features lesser-known writers of ancient India like Damodaragupta (eighth century AD), whose ‘Loves of Haralata and Dundarasena’ is about a high-born man’s doomed affair with a courtesan; Janna (twelfth century), whose Tale of the Glory-Bearer is extracted here for the story of a queen who betrays her handsome husband for a mahout, reputed to be the ugliest man in the kingdom; and the Sanskrit poets Amaru and Mayaru (seventh century), whose lyrics display an astonishing perspective on the tenderness, the fierce passion and the playful savagery of physical love. Also featured are charming stories of Hindu gods and goddesses in love, and nineteenth-century retellings of folk tales from different regions of the country like Kashmir, Punjab, Maharashtra and Rajasthan. Both passionate and sensuous in its content, this book is sure to appeal to the romantic in all of us.
A ribald, good-natured story of love in Delhi.
Jaishree Mishra’s second novel is an unexpected romp through the universal dilemmas of love and marriage. It is a compelling tale of icompatible relationships and their astonishing success rated. The Sachdevs, Memoms and Singhs are urban Indians, normal folk with everyday converns, instantly recognizable, in fact, just a little bit like youji and me. But when a foppish Delhiwalla falls for a loverly, smart keralite and his brother finds remance abroad, passion and comedy take control of their destinaies. Why are any of these couples married to each other? Why are the unmarried wanting to marry each other? And why are some of them friends? For wouldn’t you have throught that friends, at the very least, had to be vaguely compatible, even if husbands and wives weren’t?
This hilarious tale of imcompatiblities explores why we do the things we do or, indeed, why we let them happen to us.
James Achilles Kirkpatrick landed on the shores of eighteenth-century India as an ambitious soldier of the East India Company. Although eager to make his name in the subjection of a nation, it was he who was conquered—not by an army but by a Muslim Indian princess. Kirkpatrick was the British Resident at the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad when in 1798 he glimpsed Khair un-Nissa—’Most Excellent among Women’—the great-niece of the Nizam’s Prime Minister. He fell in love with Khair, and overcame many obstacles to marry her—not least of which was the fact that she was locked away in purdah and engaged to a local nobleman. Eventually, while remaining Resident, Kirkpatrick converted to Islam, and according to Indian sources even became a double-agent working for the Hyderabadis against the East India Company. Possessing all the sweep of a great nineteenth-century novel, White Mughals is a remarkable tale of harem politics, secret assignations, court intrigue, religious disputes and espionage.
On a sultry, rainy Bombay day, Nisha, an impressionable teenager, meets God in the college canteen and falls in love with his ragged, bearded looks and crude, streetwise manners. God patronizingly accepts her in his ‘group’ and it is in this way that their long and passionate romance begins. God’s driving ambition leads him into the unreal world of pseudo poetry, art for hire and compromised journalism while Nisha lands a job in advertising. Sychophants, court jesters, whores, dirty old men, fixers, pretty boys and party girls drift in and out of their lives as their careers take off with dizzying speed. And then, abruptly and harrowingly, everything about their lives goes wrong.
Kalidasa is the greatest poet and playwright in classical Sanskrit literature and one of the greatest in world literature. Kalidasa is said to have lived and composed his work at the close of the first millennium BC though his dates have not been conclusively established. In all, seven of his works have survived: three plays, three long poems and an incomplete epic. Of these, this volume offers, in a brilliant new translation, his two most famous works, the play Sakuntala, a beautiful blend of romance and fairy tale with elements of comedy; and Meghadutam (The Cloud Messenger), the many-layered poem of longing and separation. Also included is Rtusamharam (The Gathering of the Seasons), a much-neglected poem that celebrates the fulfillment of love and deserves to be known better. Taken together, these works provide a window to the remarkable world and work of a poet of whom it was said: Once, when poets were counted, Kalidasa occupied the little finger; the ring finger remains unnamed true to its name; for his second has not been found
Here, day and night were interchangeable. The immaculately dressed Chowringhee, radiant in her youth, had just stepped on to the floor at the nightclub.’ Set in 1950s Calcutta, Chowringhee is a sprawling saga of the intimate lives of managers, employees and guests at one of Calcutta’s largest hotels, the Shahjahan. Shankar, the newest recruit, recounts the stories of several people whose lives come together in the suites, restaurants, bar and backrooms of the hotel. As both observer and participant in the events, he inadvertently peels off the layers of everyday existence to expose the seamy underbelly of unfulfilled desires, broken dreams, callous manipulation and unbidden tragedy. What unfolds is not just the story of individual lives but also the incredible chronicle of a metropolis. Written by best-selling Bengali author Sankar, Chowringhee was published as a novel in 1962. Predating Arthur Hailey’s Hotel by three years, it became an instant hit, spawning translations in major Indian languages, a film and a play. Its larger-than-life characters-the enigmatic manager Marco Polo, the debonair receptionist Sata Bose, the tragic hostess Karabi Guha, among others-soon attained cult status. With its thinly veiled accounts of the private lives of real-life celebrities, and its sympathetic narrative seamlessly weaving the past and the present, it immediately established itself as a popular classic. Available for the first time in English, Chowringhee is as much a dirge as it is a homage to a city and its people.
A father who delights in the human body, its mysteries, its passion, and the knowledge that it contains and conceals. A mother who wields the power of her love mercilessly. A sister separated in childhood. An uncle who plays games of life and death as a member of the Bombay underworld. A passionate love affair that tears the family apart. And a young woman left to make sense of the world and of her own sexuality. Shashi Deshpande’s novel is about the secret lives of men and women who love, hate, plot and debate with an intensity that will absorb every reader.
It is a story that begins, conventionally enough, with a woman’s discovery of her father’s diary. As Manjari unlocks the past through its pages, rescuing old memories and recasting events and responses, the present makes its own demands: a rebellious daughter, devious property sharks and a lover who threatens to throw her life out of gear again. The ensuing struggle to reconcile nostalgia with reality and the fire of the body with the desire for companionship races to an unexpected resolution, twisting and turning through complex emotional landscapes.
In Moving On Shashi Deshpande explodes the stereotypes of familial bonds with an uncanny insight into the nature of human relationships and an equally unerring eye for detail.
