Rupa Publications, 2012 Rs. 275 Rajesh Sharma Why does Amandeep Sandhu write novels? To release the ghosts knocking under his rib cage? Admittedly. And much else adds up – attracted by the art of story-telling, prompted by the urge to delight his imagined reader, forced by the market’s monstrous hand. Paradoxically, despite a few avoidable, sometimes clichéd, musings on language and literary theory, the stock of additions includes a host of deletions that lurk spectrally under the printed words and make me wish, like a lover in fairy tales, for an undelete button that would be embedded somewhere in the novel. I dream of a publishing utopia in which the writer, like Marcel Proust’s ideal writer, does not have to be anxious about anyone’s approving eye. Like his first novel Sepia Leaves (2008), this one too – his second – is a fruit of Sandhu’s struggle to come to terms with a difficult past. “ My attem...
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