Happy Birthday! is a celebration of the complex, mysterious inner lives of our fellow human beings, by the award-winning novelist Meghna Pant.
A dedicated friend undertakes one last labour of love for a childless woman. Nadia—married into money—finds herself facing uncomfortable truths about her comfortably numb marriage. A Mumbai slum-girl dreams of speaking words valuable enough to be translated into English. An American tourist seeking nirvana sets off a sudden chain of events when his bag is stolen, and destiny plays her hand. A retired civil servant of modest means struggles to support his snooty foreign-returned daughter.
Meghna Pant’s knife-sharp stories are compelling, emotionally intelligent and provide a rare glimpse into the strange workings of the human heart. They evade neat categorization, and are the perfect read for all curious spirits.
An American agent is shot in cold blood, in the sleepy town of Mussoorie. His killing is lIndia Inked to the deaths of two guards at a remote Indo-Tibetan Border Police outpost. Both the CIA and RAW respond immediately, sending highly trained undercover agents to investigate.
Colonel Afridi—who keeps an eagle eye on India’s high-altitude borders— notices signs of dangerous activity along frozen Himalayan frontiers, echoing the treacherous history of a mountain called Rataban. Then, even as the picturesque calm of the hill station erupts with brutal violence, Afridi and the two agents piece together a bloody conspiracy of revenge and murder that could shake the very foundations of peace in the world
An American agent is shot in cold blood, in the sleepy town of Mussoorie. His killing is linked to the deaths of two guards at a remote Indo-Tibetan Border Police outpost. Both the CIA and RAW respond immediately, sending highly trained undercover agents to investigate.
Colonel Afridi-who keeps an eagle eye on India’s high-altitude borders- notices signs of dangerous activity along frozen Himalayan frontiers, echoing the treacherous history of a mountain called Rataban. Then, even as the picturesque calm of the hill station erupts with brutal violence, Afridi and the two agents piece together a bloody conspiracy of revenge and murder that could shake the very foundations of peace in the world
Prince Rabi, the fiercely proud heir to the throne of Devapur, and Sophie, the headstrong daughter of the British Resident, have known each other from childhood. Growing up in a world fraught with political intrigue and divided loyalties, both were aware of the troubled alliance that existed between the British and the Indians-and of the boundary between them that they were forbidden to cross. But all this changes one night when, during the revelries of a village festival, the two find themselves passionately drawn to each other. Realizing what is at stake, the lovers dare to defy every rule of class and race-only to find themselves torn apart on the crossroads of desire and destiny.
Panoramic in its sweep and intimate in its portrayal of human relationships, The Golden Honeycomb is an epic love story set against the splendour and turbulence of the British Raj and the growing struggle for Indian independence.
The poems of the fourteenth-century Kashmiri mystic Lal Ded, popularly known as Lalla, strike us like brief and blinding bursts of light. Emotionally rich yet philosophically precise, sumptuously enigmatic yet crisply structured, these poems are as sensuously evocative as they are charged with an ecstatic devotion. Stripping away a century of Victorian-inflected translations and paraphrases, and restoring the jagged, colloquial power of Lalla’s voice, in Ranjit Hoskote’s new translation these poems are glorious manifestos of illumination.
The more I write, the more I revisit memory like this, putting pen to paper, ink to blood, the more the dots seem to connect, and the silences speak.’
Following her faux father’s suicide, Zephyr’s life unravels into a shapeless tapestry woven in the ethanol-hand of her grandfather, Don-an amoral, sensual, manipulative bastard who’s too clever for heaven and too deranged for hell. An alcoholic extraordinaire for whom the clock always struck quarter-past rum; for whom it was always just about the libidinous moment; a man with imperial swagger and disco-ball eyes; the super king of a vast empire of solitude, and permanent resident of his daughter’s wounded heart, Don’s actions shatter Zef’s past into fragments of warring memories. Armed with only her blade of tears, she carves her way through a quagmire of dark, atavistic forces.
A mother-daughter bond formed in the afterlife, memories stored in Ziploc bags, and the horrific struggle to piece together a past that’s been through the shredder-A Cool, Dark Place is all of these plus the unsettling realization that one’s life was ghost-written by two drunks.
Praise for Delhi Stopover: ‘There is never a dull moment in the book’ Femina
With a lead role in a Hindi film Lila feels she’s doing the right thing by coming back to Mumbai.
Little does she know that the industrywallahs—from the opinionated son of the director to the exploitative co-artistes around her; from the rumour-mongering media to her egotistical agents—are all going to try their best to spoil her dreams.
Crashing B-Town explores Lila’s struggles through a highly passionate and glamorous, but also notoriously shady, Hindi film industry.
The dashing grey-eyed policeman, poster boy of the Calcutta Police Station, Inspector Bikram, has landed a case that refuses to solve itself out.
CT correspondent
The police are still fumbling with the murder of the small-time film producer, Piloo Adhikary, found dead with his two dogs on Diwali night. Assumed to be a simple crime of passion, the so-called wife being the prime suspect, the case grew murkier when her body was found floating in a pond.
The clues point to a larger racket of money laundering, shady business deals and small-time illegal arms deals, the involvement of Gaur Mohan Lal, a wheeler dealer of some clout in the film industry, and Morari Koyal, the owner of a fishing trawler.
Will Bikram be able to expose the murky underbelly of the city’s most affluent and influential?
Childhood sweethearts, good-looking Jimmy Cooper and plain Jane Mehroo Nasarwanji are now ‘grown up’ twenty-somethings. While Mehroo is loyal and crazy about Jimmy, Jimmy is anything but loyal and crazy about everything else but Mehroo. So while Jimmy charms his way through life naïve Mehroo tries every trick in Pizzazz magazine to seduce her man. Will Mehroo come out of her shell and discover her true self? Will Jimmy look beyond himself? Packed with colourful characters and a racy plot, He Loves Me Not is about two very different people who grow up together, learn about love, and discover who they really are.
When single working mother, Ira, enrolls her son, Abhi, at Bumblebees, a posh playschool in Lutyens’ Delhi, little does she know what she is getting into. The other moms are everything she is not—impeccably groomed, couture-sporting fashionistas who ‘do coffee’ at trendy joints, throw lavish birthday parties for their children, and holiday in exotic locales. In her eagerness to befriend these hip moms, Ira inadvertently lets slip a lie about her marriage that could lead to her being ostracized from this clique.
When the dashing Vasu comes back into her life, Ira asks him to pose as her ‘fake’ husband to help her save face before these women. But will her lie be found out? Will Ira and Vasu part ways or embark on a new beginning together?
Replete with memorable characters, Mom in the City is an intimate, humorous, and poignant story about contemporary motherhood, love, and life in India. The first-of-its kind in the Indian mom-lit genre.
