Description

Abductions, hijacks and kidnappings are one day wonders in the media. Have you never wondered what the people trapped in such incidents went through? What were their secret thoughts at the hair-trigger moment? Twice in Nalanda inserts you into that precarious instant when the slightest tremor could spell annihilation. You are among the commuters from Nalanda Housing Society, trapped in a bus at gunpoint on their way to work. You enter their private thoughts and participate in decisions that will mean certain death to one of them. Scapegoat or victim? How do you evaluate the lives of others?

But wait—the novel doesn’t stop at crescendo. It topples over into aftermath, and not just the immediate fallout. It takes you, 27 years later, back into the lives of the travelers who survived that first hijack. How did it impact them? Did it at all?

Lightning never strikes the same place twice, they say. Clearly, they did not mean Twice in Nalanda.

In Mr Thomas’s vision of Hell, its denizens burn enrobed in athleisure. Mr Thomas will present himself immaculate in a white bush shirt and grey trousers at the Pearly Gates when the time comes. But it is a long way off yet, he’s made sure of that. His blood pressure is perfect, his blood sugar commendable, and he walks the prescribed 3,000 steps every day. No man can do more at seventy-four. He would prefer to walk half an hour earlier, but that’s the dangerous hour when grandparents, infested with pink backpacks and dinosaur water bottles, coax, bribe or scold sleepy, sulky, inconsolable kids into the school bus, and then hold up traffic, waving madly from the middle of the road, till the bus rounds the corner.

Were he to walk half an hour later there would be the depressing spectacle of the elderly put out to sun themselves on benches and water tanks until it is feeding time again.

But now, at a quarter to eight, beginning his third and final circumambulation, Mr Thomas is confident of another fifteen minutes of peace.

Yet something nags for attention.

Ishrat Syed and Kalpana Swaminathan are surgeons who write together as Kalpish Ratna. Their novel, The Quarantine Papers, was shortlisted for the Crossword Award. Their last book, Bahadur, is a puranic history of sixteenth-century India.