April in fiction: Beat the heat with these six new books by South Asian writers

All information sourced from publishers’s blurbs.

Choice, Neel Mukherjee

A publisher, who is at war with his industry and himself, embarks on a radical experiment in his own life and the lives of those connected to him; an academic exchanges one story for another after an accident brings a stranger into her life; and a family in rural India have their lives destroyed by a gift. These three ingeniously linked but distinct narratives, each of which has devastating unintended consequences, form a breathtaking exploration of freedom, responsibility, and ethics. What happens when market values replace other notions of value and meaning? How do the choices we make affect our work, our relationships, and our place in the world?

The Spoiled Heart, Sunjeev Sahota

Nayan Olak keeps seeing Helen Fletcher around town and on his daily run out to the Peaks. She’s come back to the old house at the end of the lane, with her teenage son, Brandon, though nobody seems to remember much about her. Some trouble at school, back in the day. A certain defensiveness. Nayan is powerfully drawn to her, though he doesn’t quite know why.

He hasn’t risked love since he lost his young family in a terrible accident twenty years before. All his energy has gone into work at the union, trying to make the world better, fairer, as he sees it, as he would have wanted it for his son, and he’s now running for the leadership against accomplished newcomer, Megha. It’s a huge moment for Nayan, the culmination of everything he believes. But as he grows closer to Helen, and to the possibility that their pasts may have been connected, much more is suddenly threatened than his chances of winning.

Mahmud and Ayaz, R Raj Rao

Using the legendary love story of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni and his Turkish slave-cum-lover Ayaz as the backdrop, Mahmud and Ayaz, set in contemporary Mumbai, tells the story of a young, casually radicalised Muslim man, Mahmud Fakhar, who has failed to qualify for the IAS – where he had hoped to make a lot of money, but also to weaken the system from within – and has barely managed a temporary teaching job in a second-rate college. At a loose end after his entire family dies in the 2015 Hajj stampede, he runs into a homeless Hindu lad, the illegitimate son of a tamasha dancer, hires him as his domestic servant, converts him to Islam, re-names him Ayaz, and begins an affair with him.

It is the start of an unusual life together, and a series of journeys. Their travels take them to Somnath in the great Sultan’s footsteps, and then to Kashmir, as they are drawn into a life of petty and not-so-petty crime and, almost, of militancy. After some odd adventures, the wheel comes full circle when their wayward life ends again in Mumbai, in the neighbourhood of Mahmud’s birth, even as AIDS afflicts one of them.

The Meat Market: Ten Stories and a Novella, Mashiul Alam, translated from the Bengali by Shabnam Nadiya

In the village of Modhupur, the new mother Julekha’s breasts dry up, but to everyone’s consternation, her little baby finds a dog to suckle on; Allah’s angel gives little Khobir fifty takas to buy sweets but his gambling father snatches away the money; journalist Jamil spirals hearing that all communication has been cut off in his hometown of Roop Nagar after a girl is gangraped, hacked, cooked and eaten by young men; Modhu, a penniless farmhand, leaves for Dhaka to drive a rickshaw two weeks a month, while his wife is actively wooed and seduced by his neighbour; Aminul Islam gets slaughtered at a butcher’s shop in broad daylight on protesting the spiking of pure lamb meat with sheep and goat-meat.

Bordering on hyper-reality, leading Bengali writer Mashiul Alam’s stories hold up a mirror to Bangladeshi society. He crosses over into the surreal, which at times, as a means for us to cope and sustain, serves as an escape from the blatant, daily horrors of reality, or turns the reader into a spectator witnessing heightened versions of plausible macabre events.

Manohar Kahani, Raghu Srinivasan

Life is perfectly peaceful for the Mehtas. Kalyani Mehta’s homestay by the sea is a little garden of Eden where she, her retired occultist husband and her feckless, unemployed son live happy, dysfunctional lives.

Enter snake.

Bobby Chander, a billionaire NRI, makes a bid for the property. Kalyani rebuffs his offer, but the sleazy real estate tycoon, refusing to back down, starts making life miserable for Kalyani. With her back to the wall, she reluctantly reaches out to her younger sister, who happens to be incarcerated, for help. Maya is a genie best left in the bottle. Her elaborate con attracts a host of devious characters, pursuing nefarious agendas of their own.

Biopeculiar: Stories of an Uncertain World, Gigi Ganguly

A cloud herder gathers his flock as he prepares to retire. Meanwhile, the imminent retirement of its most talented singer is sending panic waves through the Weather Department. And a corvid inspector faced with a very tough case must also deal with a ruined reputation and morose associates.
Gigi Ganguly’s speculative short stories are shot through with a deep love for the natural world, grave concern about the crises that envelop it today and a rare kindness even as she places the blame for it all on one species.