She is twenty, restless in Delhi. He is a few years older and has travelled the world. They meet in a cafe and they fall in love. In a dark, cool flat they have sex and do drugs. And then they travel the city. From the drug dens of Paharganj to the building sites of Noida, through the wastelands of Mehrauli and the dargah in Nizamuddin charged with plaintive song, the two play out their love story to its black end.
A Bad Character is a novel about a young woman finding her sexuality and herself against the backdrop of a dangerous city. It is the great novel of Delhi, capturing its beauty, its history and its violence like no other recent novel and it is a vivid account of a young woman coming of age. Written with passionate, lyrical intensity, A Bad Character is a haunting and utterly memorable novel.
Catagory: Fiction
Fiction main category
Nirmala And Normala
Nirmala and Normala are twins separated at birth *dramatic music*.
While one goes on to become a heroine, the other goes on to become a normal person. Yes, we know we should put ‘normal’ in quotes. We also know that we should issue a disclaimer that there’s no such thing as normal, but really, let’s talk about that later.
If you’ve ever sat through a movie wondering why in the world the heroine is playing with street children or why she seems so daft despite being Harvard-educated, you should listen to Nirmala’s story.
As for Normala, well, we all know her, don’t we?
The Mahabharata
The Mahabharata is one of the greatest stories ever told. Though the basic plot is widely known, there is much more to the epic than the dispute between Kouravas and Pandavas that led to the battle in Kurukshetra. It has innumerable sub-plots that accommodate fascinating meanderings and digressions and it has rarely been translated in full, given its formidable length of 80,000 shlokas or couplets. This magnificent 10-volume unabridged translation of the epic is based on the Critical Edition compiled at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute.
The final volume ends the instructions of the Anushasana Parva. The horse sacrifice is held and Dhritarashtra, Gandhari, Kunti, Vidura and Sanjaya leave for the forest. Krishna and Balarama die as the Yadavas fight among themselves. The Pandavas leave on the great journey with the famous companion – Dharma disguised as a dog. Refusing to abandon the dog, Yudhishthira goes to heaven in his physical body and sees all the Kurus and the Pandavas are already there.
Every conceivable human emotion figures in the Mahabharata, the reason why the epic continues to hold sway over our imagination. In this lucid, nuanced and confident translation, Bibek Debroy makes the Mahabharata marvellously accessible to contemporary readers.
The Mahabharata
The Mahabharata is one of the greatest stories ever told. Though the basic plot is widely known, there is much more to the epic than the dispute between Kouravas and Pandavas that led to the battle in Kurukshetra. It has innumerable sub-plots that accommodate fascinating meanderings and digressions, and it has rarely been translated in full, given its formidable length of 80,000 shlokas or couplets. This magnificent 10-volume unabridged translation of the epic is based on the Critical Edition compiled at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute.
*
The final volume ends the instructions of the Anushasana Parva. The horse sacrifice is held, and Dhritarashtra, Gandhari, Kunti, Vidura and Sanjaya leave for the forest. Krishna and Balarama die as the Yadavas fight among themselves. The Pandavas leave on the great journey with the famous companion-Dharma disguised as a dog. Refusing to abandon the dog, Yudhishthira goes to heaven in his physical body and sees all the Kurus and the Pandavas are already there.
*
Every conceivable human emotion figures in the Mahabharata, the reason why the epic continues to hold sway over our imagination. In this lucid, nuanced and confident translation, Bibek Debroy makes the Mahabharata marvellously accessible to contemporary readers.
The Gospel of Yudas
Young and impressionable, Prema is deeply infatuated with Yudas, the enigmatic man who dredges corpses from the bottom of the nearby lake. Longing to be rescued from the tyranny of her father, a former policeman who zealously tortured Naxalite rebels during the Emergency, Prema dreams of escape and finds herself drawn to the Naxal political ideology. Convinced that Yudas was one of the inmates at her father’s prison camp, Prema believes that only he can save her. But Yudas is haunted by secrets of his own, and like his biblical namesake Judas Iscariot, he bears the burden of crushing guilt.
In her passionate pursuit of the mercurial Yudas, Prema is plunged into a world of terrifying truths and insidious lies. Ferociously powerful and utterly absorbing, The Gospel of Yudas raises alarmingly relevant questions about the politics of allegiance and the price of idealism. It is also a deeply human story about remorse, redemption and love.
JJ
Joseph James-or JJ-is dead. A famously outspoken figure in Malayalam literature, his death is particularly mourned by Balu, a Tamil writer who endeavours to preserve the luminary’s legacy by penning a biography of JJ. For this, Balu must immerse himself in the politicized and divisive Malayalam literary world, where JJ has made quite a few enemies. Thus begins an enthralling novel of ideas, brimming with sharp wit and laced with satire, as Balu gathers his thoughts and experiences to pay homage to JJ-only to discover that he might have bitten off more than he can chew.
An undisputed classic of modern Tamil fiction, JJ: Some Jottings remains bitingly relevant and scathingly funny in its vision of a society where artistic integrity is besieged by personal agendas.
The Night of the Krait
Terrorists from the Free Kashmir Front hijack a coach on the Shatabdi Express with forty people; just outside Madras. A nephew of the defence minister is among the passengers. Within the first five minutes they have killed a railway guard and caused the authorities to panic. The Special Operations Force; a team of crack commandos from the Army; is called in to deal with the crisis.
Heading the operation is Lieutenant Colonel Rajan Menon-Raja-who is soon convinced that these are not ordinary terrorists. They have the backing of a highly intelligent but crooked head. He dubs the ruthless genius the Krait. Raja leads his men in a brilliant rescue operation in Madras; but he knows this is only the opening gambit in a sinister plan devised by the terrorist mastermind; the Krait will strike again. And he realizes with dismay that the enemy might be one of them . . .
Hangman’s Journal
They say that the hangman’s job is an art. Positioning the knot under the prisoner’s ear is the most important part of the job; get it exactly right and there’s not a quiver from the rope except for that little jerk at the drop, when his neck breaks. A few millimetres off, and the man’s neck does not break; he dies of strangulation, slowly painfully.
Written with rare power and unflinching directness, this is a compelling, often unsettling account of a life of great psychological and moral complexity.
The real life story of the Hangman working for the king of Travancore, a small pre-independence South Indian kingdom unfolds in full detail. Each time he returned from the gallows, he told himself that it would be the last time. But he went back, a hundred and seventeen times. He did what he was ordered to do and shut out difficult memories, till an encounter with a writer almost a quarter century after his last hanging forced him to confront his past.
This Book takes us into the mind of a Man struggling to come to terms with his Dharma, his conscience, and his shame.
Wrathchild
Having escaped Sanctuary to try and rescue Theo, Albert and his friends find themselves in a strange, savage land, a place still reeling from the Information Epidemic, where fact and legend are inextricably intertwined and nothing is quite as it seems. And before long, they find themselves trapped between the designs of a mysterious and all-powerful druglord and the ragtag collection of survivors standing against him.
Meanwhile, Theo tries to find her way back to Sanctuary with only a fellow-prisoner to guide her-an odd, amiable manwho may just be pursuing an agenda of his own, while everyone else is pursuing him.
Albert and Theo have been in tight spots in the past, but they’ve never faced an adversary quite like this before- an enemy from beyond the grave with a very special, sinister reason to be interested in one escaped Domechild.
Shoot The Falcon
There’s blood in the sand as Raj, Nagi and Madhuri fight to keep a dangerous weapons cache out of the hands of home-grown terrorists. When the IB and private eye Rekha Dixit cross paths on the trail of an underworld kingpin in Rajasthan, sparks fly, threatening war across the borders. It’s yet another dynamite-packed thriller for the Bollywood Knights until a beautiful starlet gets caught in the crossfire.Shoot the Falcon, the third book featuring the teen detectives from Mumbai’s dazzling film world, the Bollywood Knights, is a roller-coaster ride through the romantic and treacherous dunes of remote Rajasthan. Thrilling, action-packed and thoroughly entertaining, this is one book you will find hard to put down until you reach the final spine-chilling shoot-out.