Sushanta Roy

Dysfunctional Sushanta Roy

This is a novel written in a non-linear, non-narrative style. The story & this book are woven with short stories, linked by a few threads such as characters, thoughts, etc. The stories reveal the lives & the mental states of the protagonist. The worlds created by each story are different & they collide with each other but will come together at the end having covered almost every aspect of life, every emotion, every virtue and vice. It is epic in thought but spartan in form. The individual stories span emotions such as paranoia, rage, ambitions & characters that populate worlds as varied as the communist revolutionary, urban Mumbai, art, corporate, etc. There is a child in a lower class urban neighbourhood who finds a new born baby in a public waste bin, a Naxalite Polit Bureau member, a 30 yr old B'bay banker who leaves everything to join the Maoist movement, a effete corporate exec, a Bollywood superstar & her brush with theatre, a conservative housewife who has a compulsive disorder of telling the truth & how it could destroy her life, revisiting the myth of Cain in a bleak world, etc. It is deliberately written in an e-mail kind of style, the substance condensed into the fewest words & sentences. It will be a very quick read for the reader but should set him thinking & then make him & her come back, read it again; discover the layers, the references, go back to them, i.e., see the films, read about the director & then read the stories again. It will be a different story each time.