Circuit of desire, drugs

NEW RELEASES

191 pages

Amidst the haze of an aimless college life, a young student from Shillong meets the mercurial Naina at a party near Delhi University campus. A spontaneous act of chivalry directed against Naina's violent ex-lover sparks off intimacy between him and the enigmatic girl-about-town.

But a fleeting affair with her leaves him sceptical about love and its elusive promises. Yet, Naina's hidden past becomes a phantom that refuses to blur out of his memory. A chance encounter with her and her Afghan cocaine-dealer friend two years later brings her back into his life with all her mystery and caprice intact.

Tracing the circuit of desire, drugs, violence and greed that exists on the fringes of Delhi, Jet City Woman casts fresh light on lives that have so far been peripheral to the grand narrative of this city "" students from northeast India, Tibetan and Afghan refugees, Anglo-Indians.

The dotcom boom and its eventual bust are juxtaposed with the pipe dream the BPO industry is peddling in India. Spanning five years and alternating between northeast India and Delhi, this is a story diffused with subtle humour and sharp insights, a tale set in an ancient city where lives are invented anew.

Happiness and Other Disorders
Ahmad Saidullah
Key Porter Books
256 pages
Indian price not yet available

Set in India, Burma, England, the Czech Republic, Greenland, the US, and Canada, from World War II to the present, Happiness and Other Disorders offers subtle and vivid portraits of characters and societies torn apart by violence and oppression.

Ahmad Saidullah displays a fine command over a wide and complex range of emotional effects, narrative styles, genres, and devices, all woven together in this debut collection.

In "Vatan and the Cow", an old man, whose son has married out of his religion, is forced to go on a pilgrimage to a holy place in the foothills of the Himalayas, only to return home empty-handed and broken in spirit.

In "Flight into Egypt", which was a finalist in the Drunken Boat Pan Literary Awards, an unnamed man flees on a train bound for Bombay after assassinating a politician during a religious riot in western India.

"Happiness and Other Disorders" is a comic account of the editor's back problems written in a unique run-on style. And "The Guest" is the haunting story of an Indian woman whose musical madness reveals a peculiarly Scottish slant.