Cover of SimranSIMRAN: A NOVEL (Walter Sharja; 1998 - to be republished in 2007)

(from back page)

C, a lecturer in Philosophy at Delhi University returns to his flat one evening to find a letter waiting for him. A subsequent meeting with the author of the letter puts a question mark over the supposed death of C's fiancée six year earlier. He temporarily suspends his work with the hijra community in Delhi to accompany Diamond, a researcher in aesthetics to Shimla, where he had formerly studied. At Shimla they find themselves in the midst of a right wing conspiracy. After four weeks when C returns to Delhi he is nowhere near a solution. If anything, events in the past seem even more unexplainable. Meanwhile Poonam, a six year old girl who has been adopted by Kumari, a hijra friend, gets arrested and is falsely implicated in a theft case. A friend's arrival from Calcutta with unexpected information has C rushing off to the airport. Finally, he appears to be closer to understanding what had really happened....



INGLISTAN: A Novel (Kalpaz Publications, 2007)

INGLISTAN is a novel. Its main protagonist Rabi is an Indian lawyer, who comes to New College, Oxford to do a six-month diploma in Human Rights Law. The novel chronicles the high and low points of his half-year through his interaction with relatives long settled in England, former Indian friends now based there, and students who represent British, American, European and other nationalities. He falls in love with an English girl and for some time it appears that the story will follow on the lines of the tragic affair his great uncle had with a European woman years earlier. Written in an experimental format, it is part essay, part cultural critique and part story telling. The protagonist's mind, though often agitated, dwells dispassionately on the new society he confronts and what follows and accompanies the story is a meditation comparing cultures on subjects as diverse as eating, talking, listening, enjoying, loving, childhood, sex, newspapers, religion, poverty, old age and marriage.

Inglistan