Category: Fiction
Publisher: Pan Macmillan India (forthcoming)
Rights: World rights available (excluding Indian subcontinent)
It makes little sense in knowing him by his name; he changes it more often than people change their toothbrush. His persona transforms to suit the audience too. He is a cardsharp-turned-conman extraordinaire.
But when a card game goes horribly wrong, he takes the fall and goes to prison. He soon realises he’s been tricked. Out of prison, with the help of his girlfriend and two friends, he sets up a long con to get even with those who double-crossed him.
After months of preparations and when the ‘big-night’ is underway at one of the illegal casinos, the police bust the unauthorised establishment, interrupting what would have been his biggest win. Has someone double-crossed him yet again? It’s not so much the money he’ll lose that upsets him, it’s the opportunity. He is conscious that he will never get another shot to avenge his humiliation. An orphan, an autodidact who’s emigrated from a nondescript small town to Mumbai—India’s capital of glamour and grime—and has lost it all once, he isn’t willing to concede even when victory appears Pyrrhic.
Uniquely written in his diary, alive with doodles and sketches, and skirting the truth until after the con, he tells his side of the story. And although he might come across as an unreliable narrator—he goes off on tangents, he embellishes the half-truths, he disguises the essentials, he deflects—please be advised that you are just another one of his marks; he’ll sell you a pup the same time he snookers the others.
The Author: Vish Dhamija