Embracing the local

Shillong did that to people... preserved them in its Shillong-flavoured timelessness "" the same rumours, the same jokes, the same gossip, the same petty jealousies. The scale of the town corresponded to the scale of people's imaginations."

Anjum Hasan's Lunatic in My Head begins on a typically overcast Shillong afternoon with a middle-aged schoolteacher named Firdaus Ansari walking along a wet street. Pine trees seem to drip slow tears, film posters turn to mush; a little later in this opening chapter, a precocious eight-year-old, Sophie Das, "stares past her own weeping reflection" in a window pane.

Such imagery recurs through this book, which is a portrait of life in a north-eastern city as seen through three characters of different ages, all moulded in different ways by their setting.

Teaching Hemingway in her class, Firdaus thinks of The Old Man and the Sea as a book where the story stays in the same place, but this in a sense applies to her own life too: a dream of moving to Delhi died with her parents years earlier, and now she's saddled with a thesis that seems fated never to get off the ground and a relationship that's going nowhere.

Meanwhile Aman Moondy, a young dreamer obsessed with the early Pink Floyd (and convinced he has a psychic connection with Roger Waters), is studying for the Civil Services exam for a second time and waiting, with a group of friends, "for something or someone to show them the way" "" the way out of Shillong, that is. And little Sophie chooses the world of the imagination ("she felt it was incumbent on her to lie, that the truth was often so shabby and unconvincing that she needed to embellish it merely to have something interesting to say") over mundane reality.

Their stories coalesce to form a dreamy, introspective book, probably not for all tastes. Though slow-moving at first, it acquires rhythm "" and a lyrical intensity "" as it proceeds, alternating not just between its three protagonists but from one mood to the next (the section titles include "Courage", "Sadness", "Anger", and so on), and leading up to a minor crescendo as the three paths very briefly converge.

Though there are a couple of uninvolving subplots featuring peripheral characters, Firdaus, Aman, and Sophie in particular, are vividly realised people, and Lunatic in My Head is a surprisingly confident debut. But then Hasan, who lives in Bangalore, has been writing for longer than most first-time novelists, with poems and essays published in several journals and anthologies.