electric feather: the tranquebar book of erotic stories

Edited by Ruchir Joshi

Tranquebar, Rs 395

For the first anthology of contemporary erotica in Indian English, Ruchir Joshi has collected some delightfully lush writing that makes you pleasantly uncomfortable. Like in The Delicate Predicament by Eunice de Silva: “A liaison with a married man can open up much more than your eyes” or Paromita Vohra’s Tourists which transports a Bollywood star and an ordinary girl back in the 1970s. Despair is the colour of the air that Jeet Thayil’s characters breathe. In Missing Person Last Seen, the sex is incidental, a result of mind games played languorously in a coffee shop and as soon as you’ve regulated your breathing to keep time with the lovemaking, the story ends. Niven Govinden hits the right note in The Cat, where a gay couple discover how vitriolic their relationship is after taking a few tips from a cat in a bar. Ruchir Joshi’s Arles starts with a bang: A fling with a stranger reminds the protagonist of another woman’s underwear and another time gone by. But the story that will truly shake and stir you is Sonia Jabbar’s The Advocate: “If a job must be well done and if innocence has to be forsaken, does religion matter?”

kama kahani series

Random House India , Rs 150 each

If you’re not a hardcore Mills and Boon reader, don’t pick up the Kama Kahani series. The three desi historical romances are located in sensual settings and tell tales told before: in The Zamindar’s Forbidden Love by Jasmine Saigal, Madhubati is a poor but respected scholar’s daughter who falls in love with a zamindar’s son. The class difference strikes a discordant note but in the face of true love obstacles don’t stand a chance. Saigal sets her story in 1904, a year before the proposed partition of Bengal.

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