The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjeeįew novels begin with the sheer horror of this one: a horror that rises from the belly, making you gasp and catch your breath before turning the page.
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Published in 2006, the novel is now a wildly popular series on Netflix. For the unfamiliar, it is also a swift education in the peculiarities of the city’s various districts, like Bandra, Tardeo and Dadar, offering peeks into the homes of Bombay’s rich, “30,000 square feet of Italian marble floors tied together with intercoms”, and the poor – where residents have no choice but to “let their little daughters squat to make a mess exactly where their sons played”. Packed with policemen stroking splendid handlebar moustaches, lapdogs being hurled from balconies, and villains with bulging, bloodshot eyes, Sacred Games is a brilliant exploration of politics, history and corruption. Photograph: Nicol NicolsonĪ hulking beast of a book, this delicious thriller sinks deep into Bombay’s criminal underworld, as Sikh cop Sartaj Singh goes after the infamous gangster Ganesh Gaitonde. Vijay’s beautiful debut leaps back and forth while shining a light on a politically fractious region from the perspective of a civilian – that, too, a single woman traipsing the length of India alone in search of the unknown. In a feverish moment she decides to leave home to find him, swapping her weekend trips to Bali, and beer-sticky house parties, for the blue-grey mountains of Kashmir, where the air is tinged with the “medicinal sharpness of pine sap” and waterfalls churn to a “filigreed white froth”. Since her mother’s death, three years earlier, she’s lived in limbo, unable to commit to anything and plagued by a memory from her childhood of a Kashmiri man appearing twice at their garden gate. However, here we find Shalini, a 24-year-old numbed by the banality of her privileged life in the Garden City. Not many novels are set in Bangalore, the more subdued sibling of Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata. Photograph: Tauseef Mustafa/AFP/Getty Images The White Tiger by Aravind AdigaĪ mountain village in Kashmir. If you don’t know their meanings it’s up to you to look them up. Beginning with the days of British rule and stretching up to a modern-day marital infidelity, each of the 15 stories is written in seamless prose that doesn’t jolt or falter through italics or apologetic explanations of bilati, doh thli and jadoh. Here, in the furthest reaches of India’s north-eastern fingertips, we learn about Khasi politics and culture, but always with a sense of unease – where the night is “slashed by lightning”, “knifed with light”, and the sky “the colour of razor blades”. Parachuting the reader straight in through low-hanging quilts of cloud, Pariat drops us between the plump tea bushes in and around the hill station of Shillong, where it’s cold and damp and mists swirl with the supernatural.
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Like a succession of quick slaps across the face, the opening lines of each story of this debut collection make you sit up and take full notice.
Photograph: Diptendu Dutta/AFP/Getty Images Boats on Land by Janice PariatĪ village on the outskirts of Shillong, in the northeastern Indian state of Meghalaya, home to two of the wettest places on Earth. Shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2012, Thayil refuses to use “Mumbai”, a name that was forced upon its residents by the far-right Hindu Shiv Sena party, and his affection for his former home makes this a potent love letter to the island city and its dead. Built from brutality and grouted together with beauty, Narcopolis begins as a homage to a city of harmony and acceptance, celebrating Bombay as the hero of the story – a sanctuary for Hindus, Muslims, Buddhists, Parsis and Christians – then morphs into an epitaph of a city “which obliterated its own history by changing its name and surgically altering its face”.
It’s followed by a languorous six-page sentence that unfurls like smoke from a pipe – a prelude to a powerhouse of a novel about Bombay’s old opium dens. With characteristic brazenness, Thayil opens with a dedication to HCV – the hepatitis C virus that he contracted while sharing needles and injecting government morphine in the 1980s. Photograph: Extreme Photographer/Getty Images
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