They are hired todispense a batch of stolen scooters to different corners of the city; not until the city rocks with scooter bombs does Imran realize that they have been involved in a terrorist act.One of the prime accused in the 11/11 serial blasts, Imranis destined to live in captivity for the next fourteen years. He kills time plotting jailbreak until he is assigned to the bookmaking section of the prison. The new job equips him with a new facility: each time he opens a book and stares at its blank pages, he sees them scribbled with tales from Vanity Bagh. Imran thus traces the history of animosity between Vanity Bagh, nicknamed Little Pakistan, and Mehendi, a Hindu neighbourhood.The solitude and reflection that characterize Imran’snarrative is undercut by communal tension and a simmeringviolence. Touched with a wistful small-town feeling in themidst of a teeming city, Vanity Bagh is a darkly comic tale.

    Thus begins the story of Poonachi, the little orphan goat. As you follow her story from forest to habitation, independence to motherhood, you recognise in its significant moments the depth and magnitude of your own fears and longings, fuelled by the instinct for survival that animates all life. Masterly and nuanced, Perumal Murugan’s tale forces us reflect on our own responses to hierarchy and ownership, selflessness and appetite, love and desire, living and dying. Poonachi is the story of a goat who carries the burden of being different all her life, of a she-goat who survives against the odds. It is equally an expression of solidarity with the animal world and the female condition. The tale is also a commentary on our times, on the choices we make as a society and a nation, and the increasing vulnerability of individuals, particularly writers and artists, who resist when they are pressed to submit. Reviews for Poonachi “Murugan’s sarcasm speaks of the robustness of his spirit … As in all his novels, (his) story is rich in detail … (He) sustains the narrative tension right from the start.”- Elizabeth Kuruvilla, The Hindu Literary Review

    It’s raining in Shillong. Eight-year-old Sophie Das has just realized she is adopted, but there is also the baby kicking inside her mother’s stomach whom she is dying to meet. IAS aspirant Aman Moondy is planning a first-of-its-kind Happening and praying the lovely Concordella will come. College lecturer Firdaus Ansari is going to finish her thesis, have a hard talk with her boyfriend, and then get out.Poetic, funny, tender and reflective, Lunatic in My Head is a moving portrait of a small town. And of three people joined to each other in an intricate web, determined to break out of their small-town destinies.

    ‘Our purpose is to fulfil our destiny…All life is light and shadow.’ Like any other place on earth, the territory of the Adis in the mountains of Arunachal Pradesh is ‘Pensam’—the ‘in-between’ place. Anything can happen here, and everything can be lived, and ‘the narrow boat that we call life sails along somehow in calm or stormy weather’. A mysterious boy who fell from the sky is accepted as a son of the village and grows up to become a respected elder. A young woman wounded in love is healed by a marriage of which she expected little. A mother battles fate and the law for a son she has not seen since she lost him as an infant. A remote hamlet gets a road, but the new world that comes with it threatens upheaval. And as villages become small towns and towns approximate cities, the brave and patient few guard the old ways, negotiating change with memory and remembrance. An intricate web of stories, images and the history of a tribe, The Legends of Pensam is a lyrical and moving tribute to the human spirit. With a poet’s sense for incident and language, Mamang Dai paints a memorable portrait of a land that is at once particular and universal.

    Their struggle for an independent Nagaland and their continuing search for identity provides the backdrop for the stories that make up this unusual collection. Describing how ordinary people cope with violence, how they negotiate power and force, how they seek and find safe spaces and enjoyment in the midst of terror, the author details a way of life under threat from the forces of modernization and war. No one the young, the old, the ordinary housewife, the willing partner, the militant who takes to the gun, and the young woman who sings even as she is being raped is untouched by the violence. Theirs are the stories that form the subtext of the struggles that lie at the internal faultlines of the Indian nation-state. These are stories that speak movingly of home, country, nation, nationality, identity, and direct the reader to the urgency of the issues that lie at their heart.

    Set in and around Shillong, Cherrapunjee and pockets of Assam, these tales are shaped against a larger historical canvas of the early days of the British Raj, the World Wars, conversions to Christianity, and the missionaries.Spanning a sweep of centuries, from the mid-1800s to the present day, the stories work as a historical, sociological documentation of a place and its people, interweaving the quotidian and the mythic, the mundane and the extraordinary.This is a world in which the everyday is infused with folklore and a deep belief in the supernatural. Here, a girl dreams of being a firebird. An artist watches souls turn into trees. A man shape-shifts into a tiger. Another is bewitched by water fairies. Political struggles and social unrest interweave with fireside tales and age-old superstitions.

    As the thalaivar, or headman, of Chevathar, he seeks to preserve the village from both catastrophe and change, and the decisions he makes will mark his family for generations to come.A gripping family chronicle, The House of Blue Mangoes spans nearly half a century and three generations of the Dorai family as they search for their place in a rapidly changing society. The novel brings vividly to life a small corner of India, while offering a stark indictment of colonialism and reflecting with great poignancy on the inexorable social transformations of the subcontinent.

    As the action spirals up through the floors of the building, the dramas of the residents' lives unfold: Mr. Jalal's obsessive search for higher meaning; Vinod Taneja's longing for the wife he has lost; the comic elopement of Kavita Asrani, who fancies herself the heroine of a Hindi movie.Suffused with Hindu mythology, this story of one apartment building becomes a metaphor for the social and religious division of contemporary India, and Vishnu's ascent of the staircase parallels the sours progress through the various stages of existence. As Vishnu closes in on the riddle of his own mortality, he begins to wonder whether he might not be the god Vishnu, guardian not only of the fate of the building and its occupants, but of the entire universe.

    In an ancient house in the city of Srinagar, Faiz paints exquisite papier mache pencil boxes for tourists. Evening is beginning to slip into night when he sets off for the shrine. There he finds the woman with the long black hair. Roohi begs for the boy of her dreams to come and take her away. She wants a love story, an age-old tale of love, war, temptation, duty and choice.

    Rakhi, a young painter and single mother, is struggling to come to terms with her relationship with ex-husband Sonny, a hip Bay Area DJ, and with her dream-teller mother, who has rarely spoken about her past or her native India. Rakhi has her hands full, juggling a creative dry spell, raising her daughter, and trying to save the Berkeley teahouse she and her best friend Belle own. But greater challenges are to come. When a national tragedy turns her world upside down and Rakhi needs her mother’s strength and wisdom more than ever, she loses her in a freak car accident. But uncovering her mother’s dream journals allows Rakhi to discover her mother’s long-kept secrets and sacrifices–and ultimately to confront her fears, forge a new relationship with her father, and revisit Sonny’s place in her heart.

    It is an epic narrative that moves from California to Kashmir, France, and England, and back to California again. Along the way there are tales of princesses lured from their homes by demons, legends of kings forced to defend their kingdoms against evil. And there is always love, gained and lost, uncommonly beautiful and mortally dangerous.

    Still above is Vaikuntha, heaven, abode of God.The doorkeepers of Vaikuntha are the twins, Jaya and Vijaya, both whose names mean 'victory'. One keeps you in Swarga; the other raises you into Vaikuntha.In Vaikuntha there is bliss forever, in Swarga there is pleasure for only as long as you deserve. What is the difference between Jaya and Vijaya? Solve this puzzle and you will solve the mystery of the Mahabharata.In this enthralling retelling of India's greatest epic, the Mahabharata originally known as Jaya, Devdutt Pattanaik seamlessly weaves into a single narrative plots from the Sanskrit classic as well as its many folk and regional variants, including the Pandavani of Chhattisgarh, Gondhal of Maharashtra, Terukkuttu of Tamil Nadu and Yakshagana of Karnataka.Richly illustrated with over 250 line drawings by the author, the 108 chapters abound with little-known details such as the names of the hundred Kauravas, the worship of Draupadi as a goddess in Tamil Nadu, the stories of Astika, Madhavi, Jaimini, Aravan and Barbareek, the Mahabharata version of the Shakuntalam and the Ramayana, and the dating of the war based on astronomical data.With clarity and simplicity, the tales in this elegant volume reveal the eternal relevance of the Mahabharata, the complex and disturbing meditation on the human condition that has shaped Indian thought for over 3000 years.

    All signs being auspicious, the villagers triumphantly assured Sampath's proud parents that their son was destined for greatness. Twenty years of failure later, that unfortunately does not appear to be the case. A sullen government worker, Sampath is inspired only when in search of a quiet place to take his nap. "But the world is round," his grandmother says. "Wait and see Even if it appears he is going downhill, he will come up the other side. Yes, on top of the world. He is just taking a longer route." No one believes her until, one day, Sampath climbs into a guava tree and becomes unintentionally famous as a holy man, setting off a series of events that spin increasingly out of control. A delightfully sweet comic novel that ends in a raucous bang, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard is as surprising and entertaining as it is beautifully wrought.

    Gun. A common word, but one which turns Deen Datta's world upside down.A dealer of rare books, Deen is used to a quiet life spent indoors, but as his once-solid beliefs begin to shift, he is forced to set out on an extraordinary journey; one that takes him from India to Los Angeles and Venice via a tangled route through the memories and experiences of those he meets along the way. There is Piya, a fellow Bengali-American who sets his journey in motion; Tipu, an entrepreneurial young man who opens Deen's eyes to the realities of growing up in today's world; Rafi, with his desperate attempt to help someone in need; and Cinta, an old friend who provides the missing link in the story they are all a part of. It is a journey which will upend everything he thought he knew about himself, about the Bengali legends of his childhood and about the world around him.Gun Island is a beautifully realised novel which effortlessly spans space and time. It is the story of a world on the brink, of increasing displacement and unstoppable transition. But it is also a story of hope, of a man whose faith in the world and the future is restored by two remarkable women.

    In “Requiem”, a woman goes to Alaska to try and make sense of her aunt’s disappearance. An eleventh century poet wakes to find he is as an artificially intelligent companion on a starship. A woman of no account has the ability to look into the past.Singh's work dives into the vast strangeness of the universe without and within, and she unblinkingly explores the ways we move through space and time: together, yet always apart.Contents:- With Fate Conspire (2013)- A Handful of Rice (2012)- Peripeteia (2013)- Lifepod (2007)- Oblivion: A Journey (2008)- Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra (2010)- Are You Sannata3159? (2010)- Indra's Web (2011)- Ruminations in an Alien Tongue (2012)- Sailing the Antarsa (2013)- Cry of the Kharchal (2013)- Wake-Rider (2014)- Ambiguity Machines: An Examination (2015)- Requiem (2018)