Catagory: Fiction

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.

‘Ma, I feel exhausted with consuming, with taking and grabbing and using. I am so bloated that I feel I cannot breathe any more. I am leaving to find some air, some place where I shall be able to purge myself, push back against the life given me and make my own. I feel I live in a borrowed house. It’s time to find my own . . . Forgive me . . .’

Calcutta, 1967. Unnoticed by his family, Supratik has become dangerously involved in student unrest, agitation, extremist political activism. Compelled by an idealistic desire to change his life and the world around him, all he leaves behind before disappearing is this note . . .

The ageing patriarch and matriarch of his family, the Ghoshes, preside over their large household, unaware that beneath the barely ruffled surface of their lives the sands are shifting. More than poisonous rivalries among sisters-in-law, destructive secrets, and the implosion of the family business, this is a family unraveling as the society around it fractures. For this is a moment of turbulence, of inevitable and unstoppable change: the chasm between the generations, and between those who have and those who have not, has never been wider. Ambitious, rich and compassionate, The Lives of Others unfolds a family history, and anatomizes a social class in all its contradictions. It asks: can we escape what is in our blood? How do we imagine our place amongst others in the world? Can that be reimagined? And at what cost? This is a novel of rare power and emotional force.