"These are people we meet every day in buses, on streets, in offices and departmental stores, in between our daily haggles in the fish market or while sipping a cold drink sitting inside the multiplex," said Basu.
"We never realize that these are people broken from inside by something that goes beyond their own comprehension. It is when they confront the fissures that run through their hearts, sometimes all hell breaks loose," he said.
Author Arindam Basu | Photo courtesy: Avishek Mitra/IBNS
A heart transplant patient who has unearthly visions, a parasomniac girl frantically looking for answers into her sleeplessness, a gamophobic man ploughing the furrows of his sins, make for some of these personalities.
There are others like a mythomaniac teacher who can't handle her lies, a claustrophobic man stuck in an elevator and a patient suffering from persecutory delusion, a lifer looking for retribution.
And finally a trilogy of a hired gun completes the eight central figures in a book of unexpected twists and turns.
The book was launched recently at the Oxford Bookstore in Kolkata by Snehasish Ganguly, President, Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB).
Book launch event | Photo courtesy: Avishek Mitra/IBNS
Ganguly, who found the author’s last collection of short stories ‘unputdownable’, said he will take up this new collection after the ICC ODI Men's Cricket World Cup 2023 matches to be held at the Eden Gardens in Kolkata are over.
(Reporting by Shreya Ghosh, Photos by Avishek Mitra/IBNS)