The first thing Brahma-Patra made me do was slow down. Not metaphorically. Physically. I remember reading the opening pages late at night, phone dimmed, the room quiet except for a ceiling fan slicing the air, when I realised my thumb had stopped its impatient scroll. This wasn’t a book that wanted to be consumed. It wanted to be sat with. Like a letter you don’t open in one go, because you know once you do, something inside you will shift. Shiv Shankar Jha is not a loud wr
Some books don’t begin when you open them — they begin somewhere inside you, years earlier, with a question you didn’t know you were carrying. For me, it was a dusty memory of a veteran I once met who said, in a voice that trembled just once, “War is a memory you spend your whole life negotiating with.”I never forgot that line. And the day I opened Kristin Hannah’s The Women, it returned to me, like a hand on my shoulder saying, Pay attention. This one is about the hidden neg