24 Patwardhan Cross. The solitary bone that surfaces in the garden there doesn’t mean much to police surgeon Dr Q or Inspector Savio. But Lalli, who collects curiosities, finds it curious. Things get curiouser when a dying gigolo whispers the address in terror, and curiouser still when a mummified finger with a chic manicure turns up in the same garden. Lalli might have ignored these curiosities had there not been a child at the heart of the matter. As she investigates what makes this garden grow, Lalli uncovers a gruesome tale.
Catagory: Fiction
Fiction main category
Way To Go
For not having loved one’s dead father enough, could one make amends by loving one’s child more?
Eighty-five and half paralysed, Shyamanand is on his deathbed when he goes missing. His apparent refusal to meet death in the expected way-calm and accepting and lying down-is a cause for great anguish to his son Jamun, who leads a life of quiet desperation, trying to balance feelings of despair and resignation since the suicide of his friend and neighbour Dr Mukherjee.
After their father disappears, Jamun and his brother Burfi reconnect in their old home that builder Lobhesh Monga has his eyes on. In their quest to find out what happened to Shyamanand, they find a path out of desolation, even as TV executive Kasturi, Jamun’s former lover and mother of his only child, is busy recycling the more melodramatic moments of Jamun’s life for the blockbuster Hindi soap Cheers Zindagi.
In powerful, austere prose shot through with black humour, Upamanyu Chatterjee has produced an intensely moving examination of family ties and the redemptive power of love, however imperfect, in the midst of death and degeneration.
Goat Days: Now A Major Motion Picture
Najeeb’s dearest wish is to work in the Gulf and earn enough money to send back home. He achieves his dream only to be propelled by a series of incidents, grim and absurd, into a slave-like existence herding goats in the middle of the Saudi desert. Memories of the lush, verdant landscape of his village and of his loving family haunt Najeeb whose only solace is the companionship of goats. In the end, the lonely young man contrives a hazardous scheme to escape his desert prison. Goat Days was published to acclaim in Malayalam and became a bestseller. One of the brilliant new talents of Malayalam literature, Benyamin’s wry and tender telling transforms this strange and bitter comedy of Najeeb’s life in the desert into a universal tale of loneliness and alienation.
Oleander Girl
Troubled by the silence that surrounds her parents’ death, seventeen-year-old Korobi Roy clings to her only inheritance from them: the unfinished love note she found hidden in her mother’s book of poetry. But when her grandfather dies, the young woman discovers a dark secret which will finally explain her past.
The Good Muslim
Maya Haque-outspoken, passionate, headstrong-has been estranged from her brother Sohail for almost a decade. When she returns home to Dhaka hoping for reconciliation, she discovers he has transformed beyond recognition. Can the two, both scarred by war, come together again? And what of Sohail’s young son, Zaid, caught between worlds but desperate to belong? The Good Muslim is an extraordinary novel about faith, family and the long shadow of war.
The Penguin Book Of Modern Indian Short Stories
Jeevan… Ek Utsav
The universe has bestowed limitless and infinite powers on the human
consciousness. Along with being effective and successful in our personal and
professional spheres, we must realize that the purpose of human life is to
ensure the blossoming of our consciousness. In Celebrating Life, Rishi
Nityapragya offers the secret to being the best self you can be. This book will
give you an in-depth understanding of, and practical techniques for experiencing,
transformative changes-from negative to neutral, and from neutral to positive-by
helping you identify negative emotions and showing you ways to free yourself
from them. It will also help you learn to experience and relish the beautiful
flavours of life, like enthusiasm, love, compassion and truth, whenever and
wherever you want.
Celebrating Life is an intensely honest exploration of how to be the master of
circumstances and how to make life a celebration.
Confessions Of An Indian Woman Eater
‘I now realize that leaving home was a gesture, like goodbye notes from failed suicides.’
Amit Ray leaves his upper-class home in India with nine books in his bag and seventy rupees in his pocket, beginning his journey into ‘Life’. His story runs a hectic course, from Calcutta to New Delhi and, after a poignant and disastrous Italian interlude, on to London whores, scatological misadventures, Paris, København and back to London. In-between he works variously as a shoeshine boy, cub reporter, lavatory attendant, engineer and writer. The twentieth-century Odysseus, Amit is obsessed with that contraband comestible?Woman. Adam-and-Eve confrontations lead the hero into situations which are in turn lurid, erotic, pathetic, tender and sometimes outrageously hilarious.
Like a beaver, Amit noses his way into that elusive enclave, the ‘Hampstead intellectual circuit’, and learns of the tribal customs, unspoken dogmas and ambiguous hostilities of fellow humans who would feign to know all the answers. And like the proverbial cork, he bobs up and down but never sinks. At the end of the story we find him packing his bags to revisit the land of his birth. There is a hint of thirst quenched. But if we have come to know the hero at all, we must assume that it is only a calm before another storm.
Noor
Ayesha is a twenty-something reporter in one of the world’s most dangerous cities. Her assignments range from showing up at bomb sites and picking her way through scattered body parts to interviewing her boss’s niece, the couture-cupcake designer. In between dicing with death and absurdity, Ayesha despairs over the likelihood of ever meeting a nice guy, someone like her old friend Saad, whose shoulder she cries on after every romantic misadventure. Her choices seem limited to narcissistic, adrenaline-chasing reporters who’ll do anything to get their next story—to the spoilt offspring of the Karachi elite who’ll do anything to cure their boredom. Her most pressing problem, however, is how to straighten her hair during the chronic power outages.
Karachi, You’re Killing Me! is Bridget Jones’s Diary meets The Diary of a Social Butterfly—a comedy of manners in a city with none.
Bijnis Woman
These strange, funny, intriguing tales from small-town Uttar Pradesh have been passed down orally from one generation to the next. They are likely to make one exclaim, ‘This couldn’t have happened!’, even as the narrators swear they are nothing but fact.
The bizarre chronicle of a lazy daughter-in-law, the court clerk who loved eating chaat, two cousins inseparable even in death, a blind teacher who fell in love with a woman with beautiful eyes, and other wild tales from Bareilly, Lucknow, Hapur, Badaun, Sapnawat and Pilibhit-places big and small-in that fascinating part of India called Uttar Pradesh.