The Radiance of Ashes

He believes he has a gift of empathy that allows him to enter the minds of others. If the other is a woman (and he's just knocked back a few stiff ones), perhaps it's not really her mind he wants to get into so much as her skirt. One's never quite sure with Jingo, and often nor is he. Drifter, dropout, dreamer... his strong sense of empathy is also responsible for his non-conformist choices. Refusing to go abroad for further studies, he deliberately rejects any form of class privilege in 'this hideously unequal society'. While making a living as a part-time door-to-door market researcher, he believes he's collecting characters and insights for a novel. Is he serious about his self-professed vocation? Or just too laid-back, just too fond of getting high? A social order that's ubiquitously cruel can be paralyzing - that's how he justifies his own inertia. As the novel moves effortlessly from a middle-class Parsi housing colony to a far-flung slum on the outskirts of the city, memories of a bitter love story continue to haunt Jingo, but it's only when his other romance - with the city - erupts in a nightmare of horror, he realizes he'd better wake up before it's too late. The Radiance of Ashes is a tale of desire, duty and dreams. It is also a story about families, about the truths we hold and the lies we tell, about the fires that burn in each of us - and what's left once the flames have died away.