Surabhi

About this book

For seven years, Siddharth has painted the same woman. She is always turned away. He has never seen her face. Four years ago he gave the painting a name — he could not say where the name came from — and hung it on the staircase wall of a house at the edge of Hyderabad, where almost nobody comes.

Then, on a night when the monsoon will not stop, someone knocks. She is wearing red. There is a rose in her hair. And when he asks her name, she gives him the one he has been living with for four years.

What follows is one evening: tea going cold between two people, a television playing a love story neither of them is watching, and a conversation that goes further than either of them meant it to. She knows his work. She knows what he was reaching for in that painting and never quite reached. And in a house where nothing has changed in four years, something begins to.

Surabhi is a quiet, closely observed novella about loneliness and recognition — about the things we make when nobody is looking, and what happens when one of them arrives at the door.

For readers who love literary fiction with a strange edge, slow-burn emotional storytelling, and contemporary Indian settings drawn with real affection. A single-sitting read of about 29,000 words.