Hey everyone! Hope you all are doing great in life.

I read this book too long ago to articulate my experience thoughtfully without actually googling the plot and then paraphrasing it my way, which in Rakhi Sawant's wise words, would simply mean chitting.

But yes, I am not 60 years old yet and my memory is not such a gone case also (lies) so of course I can talk about it briefly, which is why I am just going to press my knees to activate my morbid brain and try to think what this January read was like. I am not checking facts before typing these words so this would be a good time for you to lose the trust you may or may not have on me. If trusting random useless mortals on the internet is a kind of thing you are into.

Basically, from what I remember, this story revolves around a bunch of kids that live in a slum in an undisclosed city which eerily sounds similar to Delhi. But wrong things goes down when some of these kids from the slum area start disappearing mysteriously, and as expected, the cops do the bare minimum to understand what the hell is happening, because of the economic strata these ~ disposable human lives belong to.

Jay (the name I somehow remember, hmm.. impressive) - a small boy from one of these small slum families - then starts a secret detective mission of sorts to understand the source & reason of this mayhem. He takes along a few of his friends, but as you may have guessed, nothing good happens. Kids keep getting vanished/kidnapped/trafficked who really knows? - and that is how the story steers forward.

Deepa's writing is empathetic in the sense that all the characters come alive as you read about them, their grief, and their lives that are conveniently dictated by bigoted bureaucratic structures upheld by obsess men that order for ice cream every second hour ugh... It also reads like a thriller in most parts, and unsurprisingly, makes the reader curious & furious enough to stay invested in the story, until the end leaves you a little-underwhelmed I guess? At least that is what happened to me.

But still, I would recommend this book because there aren not too many that address this subject in the mainstream. Hope you will find this book interesting or maybe not. But it  is worth giving a read. Really!