By Ranjit Lal

Rs 250

Murder, bow-wow

For 17-year-old Gaurav Roy, the beautiful, black Rani was the best companion he could wish for. Rani had come from the Shroff household about two years ago, “on the written undertaking that he would be responsible for bathing, feeding and taking her out for walks”. But Rani did more for Gaurav than he did for her. She brought the newspaper and looked after Gaurav’s baby sister, Mihika.

Gaurav’s happy world gets shattered when the Prime Minister’s security guard ruthlessly guns down Rani. Gaurav vows to avenge Rani’s death and shaves his head to prepare for it, ignoring taunts of “Taklu” from friends.
Twelve-year-old Shroom is the Prime Minister’s grandniece who is recovering from cancer and is “bald as a mushroom”. Daring and carefree, she rejoices in secret service lore and in giving her caretakers the slip. Special Agent Shroom, as she calls herself, meets Gaurav and is thrilled to befriend a baldy like her. But Gaurav, focused on revenge, plans to kill Shroom. One evening, on a misty mountaintop, he gets the perfect opportunity….

Sick room
The Purple Line
By Priyamvada N. Purushotham
HarperCollins, Rs 250

Malini is born into the Krishnamoorthy family sometime in the Sixties. She is a “sick child” for most of her growing-up years — she gets the flu every month and often stays up all night coughing. Her only outings are when her grandmother takes her to watch a play. A few weeks before she is about to start school, her mother changes her name from Malini to Mrinalini after consulting a Sanskrit dictionary. At 16, Mrinalini wanders aimlessly in the school lab, studying poetry instead of chemistry. But she is mesmerised when she dissects a frog in her zoology class and sees ovaries floating in the water. It is then that
she decides to become a gynaecologist.
Twenty years later, Dr Mrinalini Krishnamoorthy sets up her clinic in Mylapore and moves into her ancestral home. Her consultation room becomes her intimate world. This is where she unearths the stories of six women — Zubeida, Megha, Tusli, Anjolie, Pooja and Leela — whose lives are intertwined without them knowing it. As their lives collide, Mrinalini has her own questions to answer — about her relationship with the man she loves, Sid, and whether she should have given up a successful career to follow Sid around the world when he had asked her to.

Flash point
The Other Side of Light
By Mishi Saran
HarperCollins, Rs 250

Asha is born with a hairlip. She undergoes corrective surgery and speech therapy, but is never comfortable with words. Amma and Baba do not have another child, and Asha grows up with the conviction that her small family is special. Her best friends include Nishita, Meethi and Melana and she has the intriguing Kabir for her boyfriend. But when she gets a camera as a gift from
Azra Aunty, she does not
hesitate to leave all of them to spend a year in a Swiss village, learning to see the world through the camera lens. While she is in Switzerland clicking away, life back home in Delhi has moved on: her best friends wander in new directions, her father is ill and Kabir shifts to Assam. The country, too, changes shape: the Emergency locks India into strife; in
1984 after Indira Gandhi’s assassination, there are anti-Sikh riots; and soon Bombay becomes the target of terrorists. Amidst this chaos, can Asha find
familiar threads when she returns?

Desires & designs
The Woman Who Flew
By Nasreen Jahan
Penguin, Rs 399

It’s been over two years and a half since Nina set up home in Dhaka, moving from a small town in Bangladesh. Her relationship with her husband, Rezaul, is besieged with unhappiness. Money is always a problem, and their tiny rented flat often has no power and water. “We had to ration water and food. And then the toilet would overflow and flood the bathroom with excrement. I would throw up all over the floor.” And to make matters worse, there is the “torment of an ancient ceiling fan” which becomes the centre of Rezaul’s attention. “When it came to
fulfilling domestic responsibilities, spending hours trying to mend that fan was his idea of doing his bit.” Such a cheerless existence soon pushes them to a divorce.
At 27, Nina is more like an old woman. Painting, her only passion, is so thoroughly “exorcised” from her life that “it felt as if it wasn’t just paint and canvas that had been banished, but the only patch of green grass had been wiped out of existence, the last ray of light snuffed out.” Hungry for fresh air, Nina strikes up a friendship with her mother’s handsome ex-lover, Irfan, who encourages her to paint again. But just as she tugs at the chains of desire, Nina’s sexually confused ex-husband insinuates himself back into her life, leaving her pregnant.

Success, pleasure
The Valmiki Syndrome: Finding the Work-Life Balance
By Ashok K. Banker
Random House, Rs 250

Ranjit can always track how well he is doing in life by the look on his wife’s face when he comes home from work. The year he got the biggest bonus of his career, Shonali was happier than he had ever seen her since they met. But when recession hit his company, Shonali’s interest in him seemed to shrivel and wither away. His problem isn’t with Shonali’s behaviour during sex. It’s his realisation that her behaviour during sex “reflects her true perception of him at that point in time”.
Journalist Ashok K. Banker believes that a man’s sense of self-esteem is drawn from the responses of people around him. Isn’t it the ultimate human fantasy to have everyone around you treat you like a “celebrity, a superstar, a demigod”. But is the whole purpose of existence just to become successful or get rich or richer? Making a successful career in this age of Kali has become the “dharma” for many. But at what cost? Working
parents don’t see enough of their children; couples barely spend time with each other; the youth have become strangers to their families and friends. So how does one strike a balance between career and family life?
The author goes back to Puranic sources to address this question. He talks about Prince Siddhartha from the ancient kingdom of Lumbini who became Gautam Buddha in his quest for finding an end to suffering. He writes of Ratnakaran the bandit, who made a living out of killing and looting to support his family, and his transformation into Valmiki. The author takes other case studies as well, like that of Sara, who struggles with her traditional father; Ravi, who is confused about his sexual relationships; and Suhasini, who remains angry all the time. Using historical parables and contemporary stories, Banker tries to answer how to prioritise, manage and enhance our personal and professional lives.

Assam 1962
Voices in the Valley
By Suravi Sharma Kumar
Rupa, Rs 295

It is 1962. The Indo-China war is on. Little Millie, born in a family of priests, gathers from scraps of her family’s conversation that the Chinese Army may come swooping in on their area, Tezpur in Assam, if the “war in the Himalayas” continues for a few more days. Their fears are soon confirmed when one pale November afternoon the “moaning war siren” starts to blow urgently. Chaos breaks out. “The Chini have reached us! The military is right here! They will now crush us under their boots!” Collecting a few valuables, the family leaves their home — Xurovi Kunj — and heads for safety. After spending a few days in the wilderness, they are delivered a piece of news that lights up their faces: the Chinese Army decided to back off for no apparent reason.
Millie grows up against the backdrop of such political
turbulence, spending her childhood with seven sisters, three anxious matriarchs and her father. In college, she becomes the “natural choice” for the secretary of the college students’ union. As ethnic clashes, militant activities and violent elections seethe the countryside, Millie is determined to make her voice heard. But is it loud enough to echo in the Brahmaputra valley?
Despite touching upon serious political issues — the Nellie massacre of 1982 and the air strike of Mizoram by the Indian Air Force in 1966 — author Suravi Sharma Kumar incorporates the sublime beauty of the Bihu dance, the orchids and tea gardens and the superstitions of villagers that echo the multi-ethnic flavour of Assam.