...and Asha, ...in vain, I try once again to express what I had tried too long ago, to you, to you alone ...no reason why I chose you, a child-woman... it must have been a trick of the hormones, my libido, though I was t ready to admit it then...

The literary ghosts of Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov are a brooding presence throughout debutant author Niranjan Sharma s (who writes under the name Ishita) novel-in-regress, harvested from his unusually perceptive life an ad man-turned-writer.

Sharma s life journey is both movement and stasis; it awakens us to angles of the world that we haven t noticed before, and achieves its complex final affirmation of love and beauty through a real reckoning with despair and heartbreak. A dark celebration of the elusiveness of memory and the self, grave yet exultant, brutal but compassionate...