Tanuj Solanki

The Machine is Learning

Introducing Sewaram Manjhi in this explosive novel that combines a tight mystery and an anti-hero who refuses to back down. Sewaram Manjhi works as a security guard outside a posh Bombay café. On the surface, he's not unlike millions of invisible Indians who make the city tick, but there is a difference: he holds rage in his heart, and he will go to any length to snatch a chunk of the good life. Enter Santosh, hostess at the restaurant across the street. A damsel in distress, Santosh has a strange request for Manjhi, and far be it from him to say no. What follows is tabaahi - mayhem - as Manjhi finds himself caught in a web of lies and deceit, and on the trail of a bag full of money that will lead to broken noses, bloody heads, sex, seduction, and murder. If he succeeds, Manjhi might finally discover what it means to be in control of one's destiny in a land where birth determines fate.

Manjhi's Mayhem

Winner of the 2019 Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar Award Muzaffarnagar, the infamous north Indian town that's a byword for unrest, and where skirmishes are prone to break out ever so often. This is a place where teenage love and friendships are tested by the violence that threatens to spill out at the slightest provocation. A town that always pulls you back into its ways, no matter how cosmopolitan the city has made you.In Diwali in Muzaffarnagar - Tanuj Solanki's new book of short stories after Neon Noon - young men and women straddle the past and the present, the metropolis and the small town, and also the parallel needs of life: solitude and family.Advance Praise for Diwali in MuzaffarnagarIntimacy and inevitable grief collide often in these haunting stories of kinship and frayed ties. Solanki writes with great sensitivity about women and men who circle around their roles in families and society, seeking identities that free them from the past, even as its hold on them remains insoluble. These are stories that ache with love, and brave the knowledge that only rarely does love transcend its attendant pain. -Sharanya ManivannanSolanki not only surprises me with his craft and voice but also revives my interest in short stories. His observations are precise, his language lyrical and his style extremely pleasing. Diwali in Muzaffarnagar is not just another collection of well-written stories. It is a reminder that we have a goldmine of tales from which gifted writers like Solanki can bring us dazzling pieces. - Anees SalimSolanki gradually opens a door into a fascinating world, putting to the sword patronizing myths about small-town India. - Prayaag AkbarSolanki's stories are brilliantly nuanced, that quintessential mofussil north Indian town - Muzaffarnagar, in this case - reflected in them with all its intimacy and prejudices. The small town is never romanticized, though, and there is an admirable matter-of-fact quality to how the stories progress and end. - Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar

Stories

Diwali in Muzaffarnagar

He is a bruised man, adrift, keening for a lost love. His sorrow submerges everything: his agony is truest, his epiphanies greatest. Do you despise him? You're too late. He despises himself already. This is his story: Anne-Marie, his true love, has left him and their Mumbai flat. There is a girl who pretends to be a lesbian with whom he has an awkward encounter of the almost-coital kind. And then, when he goes to Pattaya looking for sex (when he could have gone to Interlaken looking for love), he finds Noon, just the sort of woman who might mend - and break again - his wounded heart; and he finds Orhan, who may or may not be the son he never had. Here is a debut at once pensive and feral, cutting down to our most private tragedies - and to that shameful inference we must all some day come to: we are neither heroes nor insects.

Tanuj Solanki

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