Silk Route – Sachin Kundalkar

Description

Nishikant leads a quiet life, going for long walks around Pune with his older sister, fantasizing about the handsome next-door neighbor and lingering in bookstores while dreaming of being a writer. But when a love affair claims his sister’s life and takes the handsome neighbour far away from him, his middle-class parents pack him off to Mumbai to shield him from the scandal. Through his relationships with Shiv in Mumbai, and later with Sreenivas, in London, Nishikant is able to break apart the shackles his past have placed on him. When Nishikant moves back to Mumbai, he has become a writer and a professor and the only escape from his solitary existence are the long letters he receives from Srinivas , until one day, Sreenivas disappears mysteriously.

Silk Route translated from the Marathi Reshim Marg, invites readers to go on a journey along with Nishikant on his many travels through cities and people in a way that has rarely been seen in Indian literature. As the series’ first part, the novel lays the groundwork for this expansive narrative journey that questions love, identity and the false veneer of societal expectations.