Join Rinki and the wolf pack in the most exciting year of their lives. She has dreamed of it, longed for it, cried for it. And now, she’s it. Rinki Tripathi is finally eighteen! But, as she realizes, being eighteen comes with its own set of troubles: parental expectations (they seem to be obsessed with the ‘F’ word: Future), romantic complications (in the form of the so gorgeous- it-isn’t-fair Tejas), professional tribulations (don’t even ask).
Rinki can’t understand why her male friends prefer her female friends to her. Her college teachers can’t understand why her attendance is so poor. And her parents, poor folks, don’t understand her at all! Rinki has hit the magic number but her life is far from magical. Will the eighteenth year of her life make her feel any wiser? Read the last instalment in the Rinki series and find out.
Bringing together the best of Vaid’s highly experimental short stories, The Sculptor in Exile makes for exhilarating reading. Rigour and wit inform these complex and transgressive meditations on time, love, death, marriage, ageing, selfhood and creativity. While they vary widely in form, tone and length, recurring through the collection are stories that reflect on the figure of the artist in self-imposed exile. In his explorations of interior darkness, Vaid often pushes his experiments to the edge but never loses his footing.
An orphaned girl.
A cruel twist of fate.
A spectacular adventure.
Bengal, 1930. Young Pom’s life changes forever when her family is wiped out in a devastating flood. She becomes a maidservant in a British boarding school where she discovers her gift for languages. Amidst the drudgery of her duties, she finds unexpected friendship and experiences the stirrings of first love. However, tragedy strikes and she is forced into hiding.
Alone and desperate, she is recruited into a brothel for English officers. She hopes this secretive, decadent world will shield her from the demons of her past. But fate intervenes, and our heroine is on the run again—to Calcutta, the city of palaces, where she finds herself caught up in the rising tide of Indian nationalism. Changing her name to Kamala, she creates a new life for herself, one that holds the promise of happiness and true love . . . until her past returns haunt her.
Filled with romance, danger, intrigue and betrayal, The City of Palaces is a lush, sprawling saga about a feisty young heroine and her struggle for survival.
‘Sujata masterfully weaves her heroine’s life with India’s struggle and fight for freedom and gives us an elegant piece of Indian history wrapped beautifully in Pom’s story’—Amulya Malladi, author of The Mango Season
The story of Beero and his motley group friends is set against the impending partition of India. Beero’s passage through adolescence is told through a series of vignettes involving characters who are each more eccentric than the next—wrestler, quack, prostitute; Hindu, Muslim, Sikh. But when partition becomes a reality, in a time of terror and carnage, the insane turn out be the only ones sane.
Beero lives through a succession of days and events. His father gambles, his mother screams and gets hit by her husband, his sister flirts rather desperately. Beero searches for love and kindness in his strife-torn family. The spare delicacy of Vaid’s prose illustrates a child’s joy of play in fragile balance with the violence and poverty of his circumstances.
You hold on to that Star . . .
Jia is living her greatest dream. She’s the manager-cum-miss-do-it-all of the country’s hottest film star, Shezad Khan! A man she’s adored since her teens.
But her life takes a sudden twist when Shezad gets romantically involved with actress Ayesha. More frustrating is when she has to work with Ayesha’s attractive but infuriating manager Falak to bring the two stars together for a legendary director’s last film.
On Shezad’s trip to the Cannes red carpet, Jia suddenly finds her picture-perfect existence clouded with self-doubt, heartbreak and questionable career choices. Also that Falak, ‘the man with a girl name’ and she might have a little more in common!
Spot Girl is the story of an ordinary girl who ends up finding something ‘real’ in this fascinating world of ‘make belief’!
Jongom, an unassuming scholar, spends his days in the world of books. Until, to his bewilderment, he is singled out by a dangerous rebel leader, Anjan Phukan, who wants him to write for the separatist cause. They are arrested without warning on their first meeting, and Anjan is shot dead trying to escape. Now Jongom is forced to escape from both the police and the rebels who hold him responsible for their leader’s death. He takes with him his loyal best friend, Pranab, and together they race through the lush Assamese countryside, facing the macabre world of north-east politics and discovering along the way a terrible secret that binds them together in ways they never thought possible. Addictive and gripping, Sons of Brahma is an enthralling Assam novel.
A billionaire stock investor with a dragon-sized ego finds himself in an outrageous pickle when an eccentric entrepreneur approaches him to invest in his company which makes a revolutionary new product–NOTHING. While the billionaire dismisses him with 1 lakh rupees to seek psychiatric help, the entrepreneur instead uses the money to start manufacturing NOTHING, assigning him a stake in the company as a sign of gratefulness.
Caught in a precarious situation, the billionaire must now debate the validity of the stake he has unintentionally picked up in the company as it becomes more and more valuable each day with everyone from politicians to filmstars to aam aadmis parading the power of Nothing. Things escalate into a circus when another company sues for what they believe is a blatant patent plagiarism of their original idea.
Rambunctious, packed with tons of sarcasm, spoofs, and sketches, How to Become a Billionaire by Selling Nothing looks at the inherent madness of human nature and the ridiculous lengths people go to while doing business.
Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi’s last published work Mirages of the Mind traces an arc of nostalgia between Pakistan and India. Its main characters—Indian Muslim immigrants to Pakistan—reminisce about and long for an impossible return to their pre-Partition life in India. The book’s lightly fictionalized anecdotes, both humorous and poignantly sad, form a treasure trove of the arcana and subtle differences of twentieth-century Muslim life in the subcontinent.
A cultural memoir, multi-layered biography, and anecdotal chain, Mirages of the Mind chronicles a milieu that has all but disappeared. Its narratives portray the hardships, heartbreak, and humour of colonial north-Indian Muslim life and its subsequent forms in post-colonial India and Pakistan. The book’s central character Basharat serves the role of a wise fool—equally ridiculous and full of penetrating, bizarre sense. Basharat’s tales about his friends paint a rare, and perhaps the last, authentic picture of the literary and cultural life of South Asia’s Urdu speakers.
The first Urdu anthologies recalled the lives of poets exclusively in anecdotes. With Mirages of the Mind, Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi rekindles this form and briefly illuminates the beauty of a culture that is fast receding into the darkness of the past.
This is the endgame. The terror group Lashkar has directly threatened the prime minister of India with ‘never before’ consequences, if referendum is not declared in Kashmir immediately. The UN Security Council has called for an emergency session scheduled to meet within two days to discuss the Kashmir crisis. Rudra Pratap Singh and his team at the Anti-Terror Cell face their toughest challenge yet. Millions of innocent lives are at stake while India readies itself for a war, the terrorists’ threat is about to actualize, and time is running out. Will they be able to neutralize the threat, trace the perpetrators and avert a war?Set in the heart of a metropolis, this diabolical thriller will consume you in its labyrinthine madness.
