The first spirit Sanjoy Roy encountered was one that haunted his ancestral house in Calcutta; he was five then. A few years later, the otherworldly made its presence felt again in his parents’ sprawling bungalow in Lutyens’ Delhi. Over the decades that followed, he and his family and friends have come across a variety of apparitions, spectres and phantoms in diverse locations both in India and abroad. Some of these beings are benign or at most mischievous, but others–lost, disturbed souls–are angrier and have to be placated.
For Sanjoy, his ability to sense and interact with the supernatural is not something remarkable, but part of his everyday reality. As he sees it, there is perhaps a dimension parallel to ours, one that is teeming with spirits and souls. There’s a Ghost in My Room is a fascinating travelogue through that mysterious world.
Rich in period detail, humour and adventure, this unusual memoir makes for a compelling read and is sure to enthrall both the haunted-world sceptic and those who believe.
I interviewed him for TOI Bookmark. Here is the Spotify link.
Sanjoy K. Roy is Managing Director of Teamwork Arts, which produces over thirty highly acclaimed performing arts, visual arts and literary festivals across forty cities including the world’s largest literary gathering: the annual Jaipur Literature Festival.
No man is an island, but even if he were, there would be no escaping the many quieter beings that share space with him. From spiders weaving webs in the corners of our living rooms, to the gecko waiting for careless moths outside our windows, no person is ever alone, and this should be reason enough to uncover the secrets of the animals around us. To get to know our invisible housemates.
This book not only brings you folk stories, myths and details of local and cultural beliefs about these animals, but also information about the roles they play in shaping modern pop-culture and scientific inquiry – leading to breakthroughs that can save lives.
Deepa Padmanaban is a writer, journalist, and former scientist. She grew up in Mumbai, lived and worked in Germany and USA, and currently lives in Bengaluru.
I interviewed Rahul Pandita on his debut novel, Our Friends in Good Houses (HarperCollins India), for Moneycontrol. It was published on 12 Nov 2025.
Rahul Pandita is a journalist who is known for his reporting from war-torn areas. He is the author of Hello, Bastar: The untold story of India’s Maoist Movement; Our Moon has Blood Clots: A memoir of a lost home in Kashmir; The Lover Boy of Bahawalpur; and the co-author of The Absent State. He was awarded the International Red Cross Award for conflict reporting in 2010. His debut novel, Our Friends in Good Houses, has just been published by HarperCollins India.
Our Friends in Good Houses is about Neel, a journalist drawn to war zones. It’s in these spaces riven by conflict that his sense of dislocation, of not belonging anywhere, drops off him. At all other times, he’s in quest, seeking solid ground: a home. It is a pursuit that takes him halfway across the world to America and back to the urban dystopia of Delhi, headlong into fleeting relationships that glimmer with the promise of shelter.
He is a Yale World Fellow and also the recipient of the New India Foundation Fellowship. He lives in Delhi.
The following interview was conducted via email.
How and why did Our Friends in Good Houses come about? Would you like to elaborate on the title too?
RP: A major part of my journalistic career has been spent at the cusp of journalism and writing, what David Foster Wallace would term as being a “non-journalist journalist.” It means that I wrote in a certain way, to build the narration of a story in a particular way. The idea always was to offer a Denkbild or thought-image to my experiences. But even as I was doing it, I felt an inadequacy in my dispatches, namely that it did not have that additional layer of meaning that, in my view, made it complete. Through Our Friends in Good Houses I think my attempt was to put that additional layer. But it was also an attempt to make sense to myself of so many things I had experienced out there.
The title came to me very organically. Its meanings changed for me at different stages of writing. I’d like the readers to have the chance to derive their own meanings from it.
For most of your professional life, you established your credentials as a memoirist and a narrative nonfiction writer. So, why did you choose to write fiction? How many years did it take to write this novel?
RP: Fiction simply for reasons mentioned earlier. But also, because I felt that there are some truths you come closer to in fiction than in non-fiction. I was telling my editor Dharini Bhaskar the other day that I have no belief in psychoanalysis. But in many ways, this novel is me lying down on a couch, smoking a cigarette, while a psychoanalyst in tweed jacket with leather elbow patches, who, lo and behold, is also me, hears me out. It is like what the Buddhists say: Thought is the thinker.
The first passages of the novel were written in the US in the year 2015. But a majority of it was written between 2022-23.
In a recent panel discussion in Rome, Juan Gabriel Vásquez said that “There is a sense in which we have as novelists that we can say anything, we can discuss anything because the way stories go, seems to make them, seems to enjoy a certain kind of impunity.” Thoughts?
RP: I think what Vásquez calls “impunity” is really the moral latitude of fiction; it is the permission to wander into difficult or uncomfortable territories without the burden of having to declare a position. A novel can explore what is unspeakable in ordinary language because it doesn’t argue; it listens, it witnesses, it imagines. Storytelling allows for that simply because it creates a space where contradictions can coexist without needing to be resolved.
In Our Friends in Good Houses, I found myself drawn to lives caught between belonging and estrangement, love and loss. These are not easy moral terrains, and yet fiction allows you to walk through them without fear of judgment — to feel your way, rather than reason your way, toward understanding. That’s the novelist’s real privilege, perhaps: not impunity in the sense of freedom from consequence, but the deeper freedom to look closely, to stay with the discomfort, and to find in it some trace of truth.
What are the freedoms that fiction enables and empowers a writer with that non-fiction does not?
Fiction gives you the freedom of uncertainty, the freedom to not know and to write anyway. In non-fiction, there is an implicit contract with fact, a responsibility to the verifiable. But fiction allows you to approach truth obliquely, through emotion, through intuition, through invention. You can tell a lie that reveals something profoundly true.
When I’m writing fiction, I’m not accountable to chronology or evidence; I’m accountable to the inner weather of a character, to rhythm, to silence, to the unsaid. Fiction lets you stretch time, blur voices, or inhabit contradictions that reality might resist. It allows for moral complexity without the need for moral clarity.
What is the difference between reportage and fiction? What are the different demands that these writing styles make upon the author?
RP: Reportage and fiction share a common impulse: understanding human experience; but they travel toward it through very different routes. Reportage demands fidelity to the visible world; fiction demands fidelity to the inner one. In reportage, the writer is a witness. The reporter’s task is to see clearly, to document with precision, to stay alert to what is real and verifiable. The discipline is outward: you listen, you observe, you report. Fiction, on the other hand, asks you to surrender certainty.
In this age of migrations and conflicts, the idea of home is very fluid. What is your definition of home?
RP: I wish I could articulate that. But I can tell you this much: it is a sacred space, a hermitage. And it is something that is inseparable from love.
Conflict writing is your forte. Whether as a survivor or as a writer. But this novel describes multiple levels of conflict, even those that exist in domestic spaces. What are the emotional see-saws that you registered while writing?
RP: I’ve spent much of my writing life inside the vocabulary of external conflict. But while writing Our Friends in Good Houses, I had to meditate upon how those same fractures replicate themselves in smaller, quieter rooms. The domestic space can be just as volatile; love can wound as sharply as any shrapnel.
Is it fair to ask an author about the similarities between their life and the fiction that they create?
RP: The writer always draws something from his life or from those around it. Fiction is never hallucination unless one is describing hallucination experienced by a character. Invariably, that experience will also turn out to be that of the writer. Beckett had a heart murmur, so had Murphy. But having said that, a lot of it also bears no similarity. With the first novel, though, the similarities can be much more. As my friend Manu Joseph told me the other day: the real challenge is the second novel. Ha ha ha.
How much war and other types of literature did you read to write Our Friends in Good Houses or was that unnecessary?
RP: I had no need; I have been to enough wars myself.
Book post that I received from the publisher. Interestingly enough, it came along with Israel on the Brink : Eight Steps for a Better Future by Ilan Pappe. Both the books (published by HarperCollins India) arefilled with details about Israel and Palestine. It is challenging for a lay reader to make sense of it beyond gleaning what lies on the surface. Dialogue is urgently required. If books can help achieve it, then why not? Perhaps each side will pick up books about the opposite side and read it in quiet and come to their own conclusions. Hopefully, constructive dialogue rather than othering will be the positive impact.
Book blurb
This book unveils the clandestine strategies that have enabled Israel to not just survive but flourish since its founding in 1949, despite being surrounded and attacked by deadly adversaries. The Sword of Freedom is an eye-opening insider’s look into Israel’s transformation from a beleaguered nation to a formidable presence on the global stage.
Israel’s prosperity is rooted in smart strategies, carefully chosen alliances, and a society-wide understanding that there is no Plan B for the Jewish people. “It’s the job of the Israeli defense establishment to do whatever it can to put off the next war for as long as possible,” the author explains, “including using covert means.” Drawing from his vast experience in intelligence and national security, the author chronicles how Israel has consistently turned adversity into opportunity, brilliantly leveraging limited resources to maximum effect, using a range of strategies including:
Questioning all information from all sources.
Yossi Cohen served as the director of the Mossad from 2016 until 2021. As director, he personally orchestrated some of the Mossad’s most daring operations, such as the seizure of the Iranian nuclear archives—the exposure of which was among the main factors behind the United States’ withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal—and clandestine activity all over the world. In 2020, Cohen led the negotiations between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain. His unique work with these countries, and the important connections he forged with them, played an important role in the signing of the groundbreaking Abraham Accords. He is now the head of SoftBank Investment Advisers in Israel. Cohen and his wife, Aya, live in Israel, and are blessed with four children and eight grandchildren.
Book post that I received from the publisher. Interestingly enough, it came along with Yossi Cohen’s The Sword of Freedom. Both the books (published by HarperCollins India) arefilled with details about Israel and Palestine. It is challenging for a lay reader to make sense of it beyond gleaning what lies on the surface. Dialogue is urgently required. If books can help achieve it, then why not? Perhaps each side will pick up books about the opposite side and read it in quiet and come to their own conclusions. Hopefully, constructive dialogue rather than othering will be the positive impact.
Book blurb
Israel can’t go on like this.
7 October and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza laid bare the cracks in its foundations. It was unveiled as a country unable to protect its citizens, divided between messianic theocrats and selective liberals, resented by its neighbours and losing the support of Jews worldwide. While its leaders justify bombing campaigns exceeding the worst atrocities of World War 2 and a spiralling humanitarian catastrophe in the Gaza Strip, Israel is becoming a pariah state. Its worst enemy is not Hamas, but itself.
Ilan Pappe paves a path out of the Jewish state, rooted in restorative justice and decolonisation, including the return of refugees, the end of illegal settlements, and building bridges with the Arab world. The future can be one of reconciliation, not endless war.
Ilan Pappe is Professor of History at the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies and Director of the European Centre for Palestine Studies at the University of Exeter. He is the author of over a dozen books, including the bestselling The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine and Lobbying for Zionism on Both Sides of the Atlantic. In 2017, he received the Middle East Monitor’s Lifetime Achievement Award at the Palestine Book Awards.
Oh, this book is purely delicious. Its his love for food and all things nice. Its evocative. Every page is infused with his love for the sensuous and tactile. He knows colours, food, observes precisely and has the ability to transport a reader with a short essay into a different world..sometimes his experiences are uber-luxurious and wow! He shares them with so much grace and panache.
In The Health and Wealth Paradox, Ankush Datar and Mihir Patki present a set of principles. These principles of health and wealth are known already to everyone but the emphasis that the authors place on them being so intertwined with each other that one can learn from either discipline and apply those lessons to both. Principles such as less is more, your plan is your north star, delayed gratification, and to never judge a book by its cover. These also lend themselves to the chapter titles. Based on decades of their combined experiences in overcoming lifestyle diseases, creating sustainable patterns of healthy eating and workouts without compromising on occasional binges, and building a robust investment process for wealth creation, Datar and Patki bust popular myths, provide an actionable toolkit and endeavour to bring sanity back to the lives of many who have given up on the idea of having health and wealth together.
Ankush Datar is an investment professional, health and fitness enthusiast, and writer. He has been working in the professional investing field for the last eight years and is currently associated with PhillipCapital India in their portfolio-management services fund-management team, giving him a ringside view of the investing profession. He is a marathon runner and weightlifter, and has been doing both for the last fifteen years. He has also contributed articles to financial-services publications, appeared on podcasts and written blogs for health-tech startups and brands. He writes a personal blog on investing, health and psychology, and how these disciplines converge.
Mihir Patki is an investment professional with a deep passion for personal finance and nutrition. He started his career at Deloitte before transitioning to various capital markets roles with Bank of America Merrill Lynch and JM Financial. From 2013 to 2020, Mihir led CVK Advisors, a boutique advisory firm where he focused on special situations credit. In 2020, he co-founded Multipie, a social network for investors that grew into a vibrant community of over 1 lakh members from novices to seasoned experts. Multipie was acquired by ICICI Securities in 2022. Mihir currently works with Tata Capital’s structured finance team. He is a chartered accountant and holds an MBA from the University of Oxford.
One ancient language transformed our world. This is its story.
Star. Stjarna. Stare. Thousands of miles apart, people look up at the night sky and use the same word to describe what they see.
Listen to these English, Icelandic and Iranic words and you can hear echoes of one of the most extraordinary journeys in humanity’s past. All three of these languages – and hundreds more – share a single ancient ancestor.
Five millennia ago, in a mysterious Big Bang of its own, this proto tongue exploded, forming new worlds as it spread east and west. Today, nearly half of humanity speaks an Indo-European language. How did this happen?
In Proto, acclaimed journalist Laura Spinney sets off to find out. With her we travel the length of the steppe, navigating the Caucasus, the Silk Roads and the Hindu Kush. We follow in the footsteps of nomads and monks, Amazon warriors and lion kings – the ancient peoples who spread these tongues far and wide. In the present, Spinney meets the linguists, archaeologists and geneticists racing to recover this lost world. What they have discovered has vital lessons for our modern age, as people and their languages are on the move again.
Proto is a revelatory portrait of world history in its own words.
Laura Spinney is a science journalist and writer. She is the author of the celebrated Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World. Her writing on science has appeared in National Geographic, Nature, The Guardian and The Atlantic, among others. Born in the UK, she lives in Paris.
Aatish Taseer’s A Return to Self : Excursions in Exile ( HarperCollins India) is a collection of essays written over a period of time. The opening essay begins with the loss of his Overseas Citizenship of India in 2019. It was revoked by the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs. As a result, Aatish, a British citizen, has been unable to visit India, the country where he grew up and lived for thirty years. This loss, both practical and spiritual, sent him on a journey of revisiting the places that formed his identity and, in the process, compelled him to ask broader questions about the complex forces that make a culture and nationality. According to Wikipedia, Aatish Taseer became a US citizen on 27 July 2020.
In Istanbul, he confronts the hopes and ambitions of his former self. In Uzbekistan, he sees how what was once the majestic portal of the Silk Road is now a tourist facade. In India, he explores why Buddhism, which originated here, is practiced so little. Everywhere he goes, the ancient world mixes intimately with the contemporary: with the influences of the pandemic, the rise of new food cultures, and the ongoing cultural battles of regions around the world. How do centuries of cultures evolving and overlapping, often violently, shape the people that subsequently emerge from them?
In this blend of travelogue and memoir, Taseer casts an incisive eye at what it means to belong to a place that becomes a politicized vessel for ideas defined by exclusion and prejudice, and delves deep into the heart of the migrations that define our multicultural world.
He acknowledges the “ambition, inspiration and, at times, sheer relentlessness of Hanya Yanagihara” without whom this book would not have been possible. Hanya Yanagihara is an incredibly powerful writer in her own right, with a powerful eye for detail, but more than that, she has the knack of embodying her written word with a force, an energy, that makes her works unforgettable. It is a rare talent. Aatish is fortunate to have her as his mentor. As he asks, who else would commission an eighteen-thousand-word piece on pilgrimage? In A Return to Self, Aatish Taseer has truly transformed as a writer. As writer and academic Amitava Kumar puts it eloquently, “Writers I admire travel to discover other states of mind. But the even more admirable ones travel also to find new parts of their most authentic selves. In these pages, Taseer is such a traveller: the maps he is working with are those of the world, and also of the body, the soul, and the senses. His findings are fascinating and rich.” The book extract that has been published on Moneycontrol is from Aatish Taseer’s trip to Mongolia. The peace at the centre of this travelogue is extremely powerful and this section of the book begs to be read over and over again.
With this book, Aatish’s voice is much stronger, clearer, sharper, and very sure of himself. He has made choices or they have been foisted upon him. No one is questionning the impact of those decisions made, but the quiet strength and steely determination that imbues this book, even in the extraordinary sections of meditative reflection, ensures his space on the literary stage in a powerful manner. Much to look forward to in the future with regard to Aatish’s literary ouevre — before and after 2019.
Aatish Taseer is the author of the memoir Stranger to History: A Son’s Journey Through Islamic Lands; the acclaimed novels The Way Things Were, a finalist for the 2016 Jan Michalski Prize, The Temple-Goers, short-listed for the Costa First Novel Award, and Noon; and the memoir and travelogue The Twice-Born. He is also the translator, from the Urdu, of Manto: Selected Stories by Saadat Hasan Manto. His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He is a writer at large for T: The New York Times Style Magazine. Born in England, raised in New Delhi, and educated in the United States, Taseer now lives in New York.
Manish Gaekwad was the only child of a courtesan, so he grew up in the kothas or a brothel. Courtesans would be defined as prostitutes but usually one man (patron) took care of her and her children. The evening festivies inevitably began with a mujra or a performance. It included singing and dancing by the courtesan (s), accompanied by their musicians, and watched by an audience consisting of their patrons. Manish Gaekwad was sent by his mother to the hills to study where he acquired an education in English. His mother did her best to ensure that he did not get stuck in poverty and on the margins of society.
Writing two memoirs in quick succession, one about his mother and the other about himself, is quite a feat. There is plenty of linguistic play in his storytelling, with loads of Hindi that is also made available in English but it is almost as if both languages have equal status in his mind. Memoirs inevitably are selective storytelling about a person’s life and sometimes of their community, their context. In Manish Gaekwad’s books, there is a continuity of narrative but at the same time many incidents seem episodic. As if they had to be written down and shared. There is also this emphasis on telling his mother’s story, making her life visible, a woman who lives in the shadow of society, but her son gives her a voice, a character. In his own story, it is not necessarily a coming-of-age story but it is certainly a juxtaposition of the public and private worlds in which the idea of masculinity is explored. In the public spaces, the men and boys linked to the courtesans are encouraged to figure out their relationships and if need be, have the necessary scuffle to assert their dominance. In the shadows of the kotha, it is predatory and seeing a young boy/man like Manish, they prey upon him and sexually assault him more than once. Both these texts are seeped in violence — whether the energy required by the fittest to survive or the violent “love” and its multiple shades. Ultimately, these books attempt to share unique experiences but one cannot help but think of it also as performance art. But, then isn’t most storytelling?
I spoke to him for TOI Bookmark. Here is the Spotify link:
Manish Gaekwad is a journalist and author. He has reported for Scroll and Mid-Day, and has contributed to The Hindu and other publications as a freelancer. His literary works include the novel Lean Days and The Last Courtesan, a memoir of his mother. He co-wrote the Netflix series She with Imtiaz Ali, script-consulted on Badhaai Do and served as a senior script creative at Red Chillies Entertainment.
Both books have been published by HarperCollins India.
