Past Work
17 Novels (+37 short stories)
NOVELS
Commercial
17. My Bride
16. London Girl
15. Tiger, Tiger. Come, Come.
14. Love & Other Donkeys
13. The Celebrity Inside Us
12. Last King of Papamau
Literary Fiction
11. One Day of Madness
10. The League of Extraordinary Losers
9. My Friend Raman
8. The Spirit of Traveling
7. Syndrome
6. Le Commune
5. Butterflies
4. Soma
3. Father Figure
2. 24 Hours
1. Sons of a River
COMMERCIAL FICTION
17. My Bride
- Romantic Drama (Love, Betrayal, Devdas Syndrome, Motorcycling, Distance dating, cross-border romance)
- Setting: Pan India. Time: present.
Betrayed in love and disillusioned from life, Abhilash picks his Bullet and embarks on a long trip of India. Road soon becomes his bride, since it gives him everything he needs: food, drink, sex and a purpose to live.
On the way, he tries to get over his ex-wife who dumped him to marry a wealthy man, dreaming of a hot Russian girl he chats and gets obsessed with, though unable to figure if she is real or fake….
16. London Girl
- Romantic Comedy (Live-in relationship, feminism, east vs west, old vs new, sexuality)
- Setting: Bengaluru, Jodhpur. Time: Present.
UK-returned Ashi hates everything about India, but decides to live with an Indian boy to explore her womanhood and sexuality, about which she is eternally doubtful and worried. Losing her job due to her cranky attitude and casualness, and falling prey to drunkenness and depression, she faces another hefty trouble – her flatmate Sid falls head over heels in love with her, perfectly against her wish, and is prepared to move heaven and earth to conquer her defiant heart…
15. Tiger, Tiger. Come, Come.
- Romantic Drama (Love, romance, man-animal relationship, conservationism)
- Setting: Agra, Chambal ravines, Kaziranga Park, Kanpur zoo. Time: Present.
Love in the shadow of a Royal Bengal tiger.
Mastaan Singh, a Royal Bengal tiger, escapes from the Kanpur zoo one night, and reaches Agra in the morning riding an empty freight train. In Agra, he inadvertently gets involved with the fates of a troubled young girl and her noncommittal lover.
14. Love & Other Donkeys
- A triple romantic comedy
- Setting: Navi Mumbai, Kanpur. Time: Present.
Somnath is a genius human calculator, a topper throughout and exquisitely handsome, yet forced to live a life of suffocation and humiliations. He is extremely socially awkward and anxious, morbidly shy of girls, and largely asexual owing to his misconceptions about sex. The novel takes us through three distinct love-affairs that occur in his life: the first with a ravishing city-girl, which ends due to his lack of interest in her body and sex. The second with a traditional town-girl, which meets disaster due to cultural barriers and his ambitions for a modern life. And the third with a mature single mother, which also wades through rough waters due to age and personality mismatch…
13. The Celebrity Inside Us
- Love Quadrangle
- Setting: A fictional tech-city (India), Himalayas in Himachal Pradesh. Time: Present.
A rollercoaster love quadrangle between a girl and three boys, who are entirely different in character. Sid is a deviant boy driven by adrenaline, Augustine a mature boy with saintly temperament, Mudit a practical boy focused on growth in life. Nandini, the girl in question, is surely going to have some hard time, as all three love her equally and desire to marry her. The novel is full of unexpected twists and turns and interesting situations. Full of magic and enthrallment… but also trauma.
12. Last King of Papamau
- Social comedy (Love, Cultural transition, sexuality, prostitution, society, stock market.)
- Setting: Papamau (a fictional North Indian town), a fictional North Indian city.
A town-boy’s numerous exploits in the city.
The protagonist, a boy from a North Indian town, visits the nearby city to have sex with a city-girl. His life, however, is set for dramatic turnarounds, as he gets entrapped in a senseless maze of lust, greed for money and a desire for authentic love of a genuine city-girl…
LITERARY FICTION
11. One Day of Madness
- Literary Fiction
- Setting: A fictional North Indian city, Alleppey (Kerala). Time: Present.
- Themes: Contemporary world and its challenges, social alienation, self-importance, rebelliousness, hallucinations, innocence, unfulfilled urban desires.
It’s hard to imagine the pressure this world can exert on us.
Leslie Adams, a simple and unassuming young man hailing from the pristine backwaters of Kerala, turns deeply socially anxious living in a North Indian city. After being kicked out by his darling girl and ousted from job on false grounds, he gets too involved with the world and the numerous troubles it faces today. The novel takes us on a rollercoaster journey in which the protagonist gets obsessed with the idea that he has solutions to all the problems of the world, and that he should be contacted by the world leaders if they want to rescue the world from a deadly downward spiral.
10. The League of Extraordinary Losers
- Literary Fiction
- Setting: A fictional North Indian city. Time: Present.
- Themes: Coming-of-age, stepmother-stepson relationship, gender inequality, social inequality, social injustice, corruption, contemporary India, sexual assault, depression, love.
A senseless, drunken and rebellious woman at its centre, her stepson who finds it hard to live with a stepmom who is called a whore by everyone, not without reasons, and a beggar wholly alienated from the society. The story is a coming-of-age tale by the narrator Viktor, who tells about his turbulent past, his stormy relationship with his stepmother whom he loved beyond his life, and how the people around put them to all sorts of suffocation and ordeals.
9. My Friend Raman
- Literary Fiction
- Setting: Jaipur, all other important tourist destinations of Rajasthan. Time: Present, 1970-2000.
- Themes: Friendship, father-daughter relationship, theism-atheism, cynicism, family life, renunciation, sainthood, homosexuality, marital relationship.
The narrator, a pandit ji from Jaipur, celebrated in his locality as a saint, tells about his turbulent friendship with his only friend, who in his later years grew disillusioned and faithless. The rupture in his life, caused by a traumatic past, is so great that he can’t even face his own daughter who comes to meet him after fifteen years of alienation, all the way from London where she lives with her foster parents. The father-daughter try to work it out between themselves, as the three embark on a touristy journey through the colorful Rajasthan. In the middle of the journey, the girl’s English lover joins them, and brings a romantic angle to the novel.
8. The Spirit of Traveling
- Literary Fiction
- Setting: Agra, Darjeeling. Time: Present, 1985-2000.
- Themes: Spiritual crisis, crisis of faith, love, ethnic clashes, family, destruction of family.
Torn after the amputation of his right leg, the protagonist visits Darjeeling to find a settlement with God. While trying to jot down his turbulent thoughts, he is tempted to write about a tumultuous boyhood he has always tried to ignore. In the lap of bygone times he discovers the real wounds that had been haunting and smothering him silently.
7. Syndrome
- Literary Fiction
- Setting: Kirpalpur (a fictional city in Punjab), Shujatpur (a fictional erstwhile princely state in Rajasthan) Time: Present, 2000-2010, 1985-1990.
- Themes: Identity, quest for love, dignity and belongingness, sexuality, emptiness, marital relations, how history shapes us.
A promiscuous prince in hiding, a fragile and defeated old man trying to find dignity through regaining manhood, a fat woman’s quest to rediscover love from her alienated husband, and a beauty mistreated by her destiny trying to find a dignified way to survive.
Syndrome is a novel about quest for love, dignity and belongingness. It’s a novel about unfulfilled desires and the limits we humans cross to satisfy them. And it’s a story about how past haunts us all our lives.
6. Le Commune
- Literary Fiction
- Setting: A fictional North Indian city, a fictional fishermen’s village by the sea (Andhra coast), an ashram by the sea. Time: 1982-1986, 2012.
- Themes: Historical trauma, history, quest for love and family, death, faith, guilt, salvation.
A young man whose past has been marred by all sorts of traumas, finds himself guilty of not saving the life of a friend, while he could. In quest of salvation, he visits an ashram where his life takes him on a journey to finding true love for himself, all through the disturbance and guilt of past which wouldn’t let him live. Ultimately, it turns out to be a love triangle with him at the centre, a fisherman’s widow and an English woman residing in the ashram.
5. Butterflies
- Literary Fiction
- Setting: Mumbai, Delhi. Time: 2009.
- Themes: Urban Life, emptiness, identity, transition, love.
The novel explores the lives of a few women trying to find a footing in the crowded metropolises, their quest for love, identity and transformations which would carry them to a spot of painless existence.
4. Soma
- Literary Fiction
- Setting: Chambal Valley. Time: 1970.
- Themes: Rebellion, loss of innocence, love.
Soma, a jovial man and bizarre farmer, turns into a rebel bandit after his beloved wife is sexually molested by the men of higher caste. The novel tells about his life in the ravines, his forming the gang, gang-wars, robberies and other exploits, and how he finally met his end.
3. Father Figure
- Literary Fiction
- Setting: Dhanbad, Kanpur, and many other cities. Time: 2004-2007.
- Themes: History, displacement, love, belongingness, Hindu-Muslim relations, British rule of India, characters that define India.
The novel presents a panoramic view of India, tracing its rich history and conflicts through the story of Rupa (a beautiful young girl, a housemaid) and her blind brother Nitya, who were kidnapped at a young age by a decrepit book-seller and brought up with care and diligence. Later, the father succumbs to the moral crisis caused by his attraction for his pretty daughter, and decides to restore them to their biological father, who is a Muslim. The real father turns out to be a demented old man of seventy, bitter in temperament and paranoid about the world. Rest of the novel explores the siblings’ journey towards finding settlement with their new surroundings, a clamorous and filthy locality of Kanpur, and their own embittered father. The novel brings scores of Indian characters, which define the tragedies and joys of our nation and her billion inhabitants.
2. 24 Hours
- Literary Fiction (+psychological thriller)
- Setting: A fictional North Indian city. Time: 2006.
- Themes: Riot, psychosis, loss of innocence
A character-driven novel in which its nervy protagonist, waking up after a long sleep, finds himself in the middle of a curfew. Unable to sustain the claustrophobia of his dilapidated house, he ventures out to challenge this new restriction on his already smothered existence, only to find himself in unusual dangers and terrors which gradually bring him to the verge of madness. The man, who has never hurt a soul, finally ends up murdering a prostitute he meets and falls in love with during the same day.
1.Sons of a River
- (Intended) Literary Fiction
- Setting: Chambal Valley, Kanpur. Time: 1970.
- Themes: Brotherly love, disenchantment, sainthood, rebellion, salvation.
The story of two brothers, one considered a ‘blessing’ and the other a ‘curse’. Explores their lives as they grow up. The first (blessing) becomes a saint, while the other grows into a rebel and becomes a baghi (rebel bandit).None realizes salvation though. In the end, they find themselves incomplete, hollow and disenchanted from life.
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