Category: Fiction
Publisher: Westland Books (forthcoming)
Rights: World rights available (excluding Indian subcontinent)
What can a septuagenarian titular king, who is the custodian of the world’s richest temple, do if his own son wants to loot a part of the treasures hoarded in the secret underground chambers of the temple? Upset and troubled, the king drinks early that day, sitting under the shade of the neem tree in the palace courtyard, when Harimohan, a commoner, meets him with a strange request. Feeling redundant and smarting under the anger against his son, the king listens to Harimohan’s struggles to make ends meet, and over days, tells him his own sense of redundancy and his private sorrows and regrets.
In a satellite town of the city, which is fast emerging as an IT hub, a born-again pastor and a young priest of the Catholic church are fighting their own existential dilemmas, communal fractures and carnal-spiritual conflicts. A blacksmith, who cuts the throat of young man who has stabbed his son to death for his Party, grapples with the emptiness after an act of revenge. Molly Aunty, Harimohan’s maternal aunt, cannot tolerate the fact that a large number of Hindus are attending the pastor’s worship services. Udayan, the king’s illicit son with Mallika, is caught between lifelong indignation and anger against the king, and a sense of filial obligation.
A Calamitous Afternoon tells us how a few scattered incidents come to a culmination in one calamitous afternoon when a cyclone ravages a southern India city.
The author: Sabin Iqbal