There are cities you visit. And then there are cities that sit inside you like unfinished conversations.   Reading Kolkata Ø KM by Swati Bhattacharyya felt less like turning pages and more like wandering through a house of echoes. Not haunted in a loud, theatrical way. Haunted the way memory is — soft-footed, patient, persistent.   This is not a book that rushes. It lingers. It circles. It asks you to sit with moments most of us hurry past.   What stayed with me most was the

There’s something quietly unsettling about a tree that watches you. Not in a mythical, larger-than-life way — but in the way an old house watches its inhabitants age, fracture, betray, and forgive. That was the feeling I carried through The Parijat Tree and Other Stories by Sameer Nagarajan — the sense that these stories are not merely told, they are observed. Closely. Patiently. Almost clinically at times.   This collection moves across decades of Indian life — from the 70s

I keep thinking about how casually we take photographs now. A thumb tap. A half-smile. A moment frozen without intention. Kachri Kamble: Selfie That Rewrote Politics made me uneasy about that casualness. It reminded me that in the age of spectacle, innocence doesn’t need to be loud to be punished—it only needs to be visible.   I read this book slowly, not because the narrative drags, but because it presses against something tender. Sandeep Sinha begins with an act so ordinary

Pune is the second city I’ve loved deeply, after Mumbai. I’ve been there countless times—often enough to know the older parts by instinct, to recognise the quiet charm of its lanes, and to slowly understand the language of its newer, faster edges too. If life ever asked me to move away from Mumbai, Pune would be the only city I’d agree to without a long internal argument. It has that rare quality of familiarity without ownership, closeness without pressure. Reading Pune Junct

Some books don’t take you back to school. They take you back to a feeling. A tightness in the chest. A silence you learned to live with. IX B: The Fragile Heart of an Achiever did that to me—not by reminding me of my own classroom, but by pulling me into a memory I hadn’t connected to school life until now.   I grew up in a co-ed environment. Boys, girls, shared benches, shared laughter, shared awkwardness. So, when people talk about the “only boys’ school experience,” I usua

Some books announce themselves with a thesis. This one arrived like humidity on skin—quiet, unavoidable, already inside the room before I knew it. I was reading, but I was also standing on a riverbank at night, ash cooling, water moving, the world refusing to pause for grief. That opening feeling never really left me. Dhara doesn’t ask for attention. It assumes you will eventually slow down enough to listen.   Bal Krishna Thakur’s Dhara: A Journey of Grief, Continuity, and In

There are some characters we inherit, not choose.   Their meanings are handed to us early, wrapped in certainty, repeated until curiosity feels unnecessary. Ravan arrived in my life that way — already concluded, already named, already sealed. Evil was not something to be examined; it was something to be defeated. The story had taught me where to stand long before I knew how to ask why.   So when I picked up this book, I didn’t do so with reverence or rebellion. I came carryin

I didn’t ease into When I Hit You — it felt more like stumbling into a scene already in motion. The kind where the camera is trembling, the soundtrack has gone silent, and you realise you’ve entered a story that isn’t waiting for you to settle in. Friends had mentioned how intense it was, but nothing prepares you for the way this book grips your collar and says, “Stay. Watch.” A few pages in, I knew I wasn’t reading for leisure; I was witnessing a life being peeled open.   Me

There are some books that don’t just tell a story — they unspool a silence you’ve been carrying within yourself. The Far Field by Madhuri Vijay is one of them. I remember reading it late one evening, the rain tapping against my window like a nervous confession. By the time I closed the book, I wasn’t sure whether it was the rain outside or the one that had started within me.   Madhuri Vijay, in her debut, doesn’t announce herself with fireworks. She arrives like mist — quietl

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