Karno is a freelance writer and a failed marathon runner who lives in Delhi. He occasionally runs a bookstore. But he does not compare himself to the character played by the handsome Hugh Grant, the quaint bookstore owner from the iconic Hollywood movie Notting Hill, with whom the actress played by the beautiful Julia Roberts falls in love. Nor with Milkha Singh, the legendary Indian sprinter also known as The Flying Sikh, when he decides to chase a thief through the dusty lanes of Daryaganj.
He is what you can call just another upper-middle-class educated man who loves the good things in life but is content with a “mid-range” mobile phone. He has good taste in music. He listens to Jim Morrison and David Bowie and craves Blue Tokai coffee. The other characters in the novel listen to Phil Collins and John Coltrane. They read David Foster Wallace and James Baldwin; they watch Ingmar Bergman films. They have long, writerly conversations over cold coffee at the Coffee House. They engage in enthusiastic debates about people living in hiding, in the forests of Chhattisgarh, beer in hand. You get the drift.
A speculative mess
In Sayantan Ghosh’s debut novel Lonely People Meet, Karno dreams of meeting a girl who might fix...
