Maya is an urban millennial with a very full life. So it comes as a shock to her friends when she goes offline and ghosts them all of a sudden. As their enquiry into her absence gets increasingly frantic, Maya herself oscillates between fear and honesty, therapy and godmen, superstition and nostalgia. Crushed by generational trauma and long-hidden secrets, she chases faith and love in the most hopeless places, knowing that the only way out is through.
Among the communities that have, over the centuries, graced the open shores of India, one is rarely acknowledged. The Bene Israels, one of the ten lost tribes of Israel, arrived at the Konkan Coast, shipwrecked, around 2,000 years ago, and for generations, made the subcontinent their home. This novel – narrated by Miss Seema Samuel, an almost 70-year-old Bene Israel living in an old age home – tells their story – of their trials and tribulations, love and loss, and their longing for “Aliyah”, the return to the Promised Land of Israel.
Shifting from the Konkani shores to the bustling streets of Ahmedabad, and finally to the tranquillity of an old-age home on the outskirts of Pune, each generation of Seema’s family grapples with the tension between their Jewish faith and Indian identity, struggling with their fear of persecution and a yearning for acceptance.
Muses Over Mumbai is written with the single underlying belief that a city lives through the characters that occupy it. Among many others, you will meet Major Anirudh Sood, a war hero struggling to resolve a housing society feud; Shraddha, the mochi’s wife, who goes to great lengths to protect her twin daughters; Anuradha Singhal, an attractive socialite and fitness coach who must confront her fragility; Ramkumar Tiwari, an upright constable grappling with questions of caste, morality and pride; the author himself, demanding answers from the last surviving terrorist of the 26/11 attacks; Gussy, an advertising executive pursued by a homicidal cabbie; Ramesh Malpani, a half-crazed tycoon who must draw on his business guile to fend off an extortion threat; Kitayun Alwa, an environmental activist who takes up cudgels against the city authorities; Jai Singhal, a family-loving builder who ought to prove his love for the city; Sikander, a waste collector with a mission to save the city’s stray dogs; Auntie Elena and her obsession with a lavish Christmas lunch; and Inspector Bedekar, who has but a single night to prove the innocence of a friend. These fictional episodes are a tribute to a city of infinite stories and its nocturnal protagonists.
In “Malayali Memorial”, the protagonist is a low-lying, wily and seemingly powerless man in a stridently casteist family; the young man in “Boy and Girl” is the weepy sort, yet his powerless tears seem to have the power to soften the resolve of a confident young woman. This collection highlights Unni’s experiments with the short story form.
He was no hero. He was not one to rescue his loved one by hauling her back from the blazing wreckage of a broken world or by fighting a war to win her hand. But he was sweet and sensitive. And loved. Fiercely. By his wife and the dancing girl. They loved him and lost him in turns. But to the bitter end, they went on loving him.
Swept away on the tides of breathtaking passion and delicious desire, Kannagi, the wife, and Madhavi, the dancing girl, find themselves plummeting to the unforgiving depths of love and despair, armed only with futile hope and the bleakly dawning realisation that exquisite pleasure must be paid for with endless pain.
There are no good people here. And perhaps no truly evil ones. A small-time thief and hustler and his lover and pimp, who is a rising star in Delhi’s music scene. A lost American and acolyte of a so-called guru. A young woman who hopes to save herself by becoming a boss in one of India’s new mafias. And everyone floating in a world of shades of grey.
All information sourced from publishers.