Three lives, Three Journeys – 3 Book Set

About the Books

1. The Secret Life of Amal Gupta by Arindam Basu

Amal Gupta is approaching sixty, a prize-winning writer whose books don’t sell much, wandering the streets of Dum Dum on a spring morning with nowhere particular to go. He has rented homes across Kolkata’s neighbourhoods for thirty-two years — Cossipore, Baranagar, Bhowanipore — treating the city as his classroom and himself as its most devoted student. Now, standing on the pavement with the wind in his salt-and-pepper hair, he wonders whether there is any joy left in writing at all.

What unfolds is less a plot than a rich, roving portrait of a man in full. Amal bluffs his way through a TV repair complaint by impersonating a police officer, then a local gangster — slipping in and out of invented identities with the ease of a born actor. He haggles with his wife Gauri over figs and bathroom time with the same playful tenderness that once fuelled his finest novels. He reads a newspaper report about a sixty-year-old man who ended his life in despair, and finds himself utterly unable to relate to such purposelessness.

Meanwhile, in a house not far away, a young woman named Swati has devoted an entire shelf of her bookcase to Amal Gupta’s collected works — every single one — bought with her tutoring money, read with a devotion bordering on obsession.

Funny, melancholic, and shot through with poems that arrive in Amal’s mind like sudden weather, this is a novel about what it means to live a second life inside the first — the life of the imagination, the only one that truly counts.

2. Laffaz by Yogendra Ahuja

“Yogendra Ahuja is a masterful chronicler of the dreary, stifling, and muted landscapes of small towns and bustling metropolises. His settings are often gray, his characters tinged with absurdity. Yet, in crafting the narrative of Laffaz, Ahuja shifts his focus away from conventional “characters” or settings, choosing instead to spotlight a particular tendency. The Laffaz we encounter in this story—a figure endlessly practising the art of fluent deception, assuming new forms, committing fraud in varying styles, telling obscene tales, and waxing eloquent on patriotism and public welfare—is not a singular character. Instead, it embodies a “trend without character.” Portraying such a shapeshifting, elusive “Laffaz” and anchoring it within the framework of a cohesive narrative is a daunting challenge. Yet, Ahuja achieves this with remarkable persistence. No matter how intricate or rugged the path, he does not falter or succumb to frustration. Instead, he steadfastly pursues his quarry to the very end, capturing its essence with a storyteller’s tenacity and insight.

3. The Ruffian by Swapnamoy Chakraborty

The Ruffian unbuttons  history and lore lurking in Kolkata’s long, overlooked underbelly. As seen through the lenses of an old ruffian– here unheard voices hold hands with the shrieks in the forgotten alley, strangest of lovers wander away, street loonies whisper in the ears of failed leaders, and abandoned children curl up into the bosoms of unloved women and together they weave a  timeless memoir of the city and its moonshines.