BUY the eBook: Nine Lives and a Death

Author: Sabarna Roy

eBook: 9 Lives and a Death ISBN 978-81-906865-5-6 300 pages

Buy eBook version: US$5.00

Buy Print* version: US$17.00       *ONLY available for India delivery. When ordering the print version of the book, expect 7-10 working days for delivering.

The first work of fiction being published by Chillibreeze is a set of stories by a Kolkata based writer and poet Sabarna Roy. Titled ‘Nine Lives and a Death’, the stories revolve around an average Indian urban male named Rahul. The stories are set in Kolkata and deal with contemporary issues of urban life, predominantly the dark side of man-woman relationship dominated by deceit, betrayals and melancholy of love and loss.

The ten different stories in the e-book are:
1. Fallen Man
2. Improbable Love Affair
3. Act of Revenge
4. Midnight Conversation
5. Incident of the Past
6. Meeting in a Café
7. Random Trail
8. Reunion
9. Lie
10. Last Plunge

Excerpts from the eBook:

Author’s Note:
Temperamentally the stories revolve around desire, longing, betrayal and loss. There is an element of betrayal in each story either by Rahul or an important female character or both, within the man-woman bond. I have made a sincere attempt to look at betrayal without any moral or ideological leanings and tried to build up the sequence of events as realistically I could. Betrayal in real life results in devastating loss and melancholy and so it has crept in the stories as well. While in real life most of the times we are compelled to make a choice between the ‘betrayer’ and the ‘betrayed’; a writer enjoys the freedom to make no such choice because both enjoy equal space, affection and pity in his imaginary universe.

Preface:
The psychological meanderings of the principal protagonist – Rahul, throw light on the modern man’s predicament. Amidst all the urbanization, modernization, concretization, money and power, his soul is restless. There’s a loneliness that stirs and churns him. He relentlessly makes efforts to either infuse some order into his situation - as Rahul does in ‘Reunion’ or succumbs to the dreary and stark realities of his life - as Rahul does in ‘Act of Revenge’. There’s a search for salvation, for redemption, as the past hovers around – as in case of Rahul in ‘Meeting in a Café’.

Fallen Man:
Rahul traveled like this for nearly four years. When he was in Haridwar, one night, he was short on stuff and felt a rocking pain shoot through his entire body, a desert like dryness tearing down his abdomen and a billion electric bulbs flashing across his eyes; he had lost complete control of his movements. A gentleman caught him on the road, dragged him down to the Har Ki Pauri, made him take five dips in the ice-cold speeding waters of the Ganga and asked him in chaste Hindi: where did he come from. Rahul looked down and was amazed by the sudden revelation of his mother’s sad face projected on the flowing surface of water. The pain building deep inside his body was replaced by a surmounting desire to leap into his mother’s lap and sleep inside the shadow of her body. He wanted to sink in the aroma of a safe shelter. Rahul said, “I want to return to my mother.”

Act of Revenge:
Outside the night looked sinister with the snow falling lightly, its coldness reaching deep into a pounding soul. He looked at Nina’s sketch again, this time in flickering candlelight and considered skipping dinner and instead going out for a night walk to drown him in darkness and snow. As he was about to leave his room, his hand phone rang, the tune of a Viennese waltz, and he saw an unidentified number blink on the LCD screen. He was in two minds about whether to attend to the call, which he did after a few seconds of contemplation. For some time there was a hush of deliberate silence at the other end. As he was about to disconnect the call, he heard an aggressive male voice ask him, “Is this Rahul Banerjee?”

Last Plunge:
One evening, as Rahul was walking back home, he saw a tall veiled man walking past him in slow motion illuminating his mind with a flash of light in which he saw (in the theater of his mind) his look-alike falling peacefully inside a gorge filled with flakes of snow (although it was hot and humid on the road). He was suddenly transported from the chaos on the road to the overpowering silence inside the gorge and the fiery orange-tinged black sky filled the solitude of his soul with a sense of pride as if his loneliness had a unique meaning and a purpose.

For more information on how to publish: epublishing @ chillibreeze.com

Buy other books by Sabarna Roy at Chillibreeze
Mainak and I: One night in the ocean

The author has a dedicated page on www.oxfordbookstore.com