Bok, a guitar player with a Shillong band, has a lot on his mind. His elder brother Kitdor has lost 50 lakh rupees on a trip to Nagaland to purchase arms for a group of militants. Kitdor is given a week to repay the money, and the only person he can turn to is his laidback younger brother. Bok is helpless until a chance encounter with a beautiful woman provides him with a desperate solution. But fate can’t be cheated and soon the hapless musician is tangled in her web of lies. He must outmanoeuvre her and the trail of politicians, militants and cops she leaves in her wake, and find the 50 lakh in time if he is to save his brother. Dark, atmospheric and utterly gripping, The Girl from Nongrim Hills is a superb thriller and a great Shillong novel.

This e-book is a re-issue of the 2007 paperback edition, with a new introduction by the author. Amidst the haze of an aimless college life, a young student from Shillong meets the mercurial Naina at a party near Delhi University campus. His spontaneous act of chivalry against Naina's violent ex-lover sparks off intimacy between him and this enigmatic girl-about-town. But a hot, fleeting affair with her leaves him sceptical about love and its elusive promises. Yet, Naina's hidden past becomes a phantom that refuses to blur out of his memory long after she's gone. A chance encounter with her and her Afghan cocaine-dealer friend two years later brings Naina back into his life with all her mystery and caprice intact. Tracing the circuit of desire, drugs, violence, and greed that exists at the fringes of Delhi, Jet City Woman casts light on lives that have so far been peripheral to the grand narrative of this city---students from Northeast India, Tibetan and Afghan refugees, Anglo-Indians. The dotcom boom and its eventual bust are juxtaposed with the pipe dream the BPO industry is peddling in India. Spanning five years, and alternating between Northeast India and New Delhi, this is a story of love and loss, of lives adrift in a mega city, and of the lesser-known side of urban India. Diffused with subtle humour and sharp insights, it is a tale set in an ancient city where chimaeras are chased and lives are invented anew. Ankush Saikia was born in Tezpur, Assam in 1975, and grew up in Madison, Wisconsin; Assam; and Shillong, Meghalaya. He has worked in journalism and publishing in New Delhi, and is the author of several books, including The Girl from Nongrim Hills, The Forest Beneath the Mountains, and the Detective Arjun Arora series.

A chopped-up body recovered from a tandoor oven A quiet young accountant missing with a suitcase full of cash Match-fixing and illegal betting in a city in the grip of T20 ever A lonely detective with a conscience ... Private eye Arjun Arora works the streets of Delhi dealing with the shady underbelly of the capital city. Hired to track down a missing person, Arjun stumbles upon a gruesome murder where the suspects seem to be linked to something larger and more sinister. Part noir thriller and part detective story, Dead Meat introduces us to an unforgettable character-Arjun Arora, a man with a troubled past-who takes us on a dark and memorable journey through the greed and grime of today’s urban India.

A girl from north-east India is murdered in Delhi. The main suspect is her 'Indian' boyfriend, but there isn't enough evidence to prove his guilt. Amid a growing outcry about police neglect and racial injustice, detective Arjun Arora reluctantly takes on this case. Immediately, he finds himself propelled into a tangled investigation that leads him beyond the hills of Nagaland and Manipur to the Indo-Myanmar border with new suspects emerging at every turn, including an American working at the US Embassy who may or may not be a CIA spy. The search for answers embroils him in the dangerous new realities of the North-east--riven with strife and suffering--and also brings him face-to-face with an old enemy, culminating in an unexpected climax.

Description Shaken by the news of his mother's death, a man leaves his job in Delhi and returns to Assam. Twenty-five years ago, his father, a forest officer here, was found shot dead in his jeep. With the passing of his mother, the man learns new and startling details of his father's life, and trying to reclaim an entire life suddenly made unfamiliar, he starts digging into events from far back in time, visiting places where his father had served, in the foothills of the eastern Himalayas. But the forests he had once roamed as a boy with his father and his band of hard drinking, rugged companions, have long disappeared. Settlers have moved in, and insurgents and security forces now prowl the area. Wandering what was once the Chariduar reserve forest, the man meets a kaleidoscopic cast of characters-people trying to find anchor in an uncertain world- some of whom are remnants of a rapidly disappearing past and some from the region's turbulent present: foresters, elephant catchers, army contractors, insurgents, police commandos, drifters and double-dealers. As he gets closer to the truth about his father, he finds himself drawn into a local conflict, a world of shifting realities from which he will struggle to disentangle himself. Wide, unhurried and immersive, The Forest Beneath the Mountains is a compelling blend of memory, family stories, ecology and history. It is a story of people and places at the margins of the Indian republic, and of the inevitable taming of wilderness by man.

Detective Arjun Arora is summoned to Mumbai to track down an airhostess who has allegedly killed a bar dancer and vanished with a large sum of money. The search for Agnes Pereira leads Arjun on a nationwide hunt. But when their paths finally cross, everything spirals out of control. From being hunted by a hitman to uncovering a deadly secret that implicates Delhi’s rich and powerful, Arjun’s life becomes an endless nightmare. Haunted by his personal demons and aware of his growing attraction to the beautiful, mysterious Agnes, Arjun realizes that sins from the past always cast their shadow over the present. But the closer he gets to the truth, the more terrifying the threat becomes to both of them.

‘There were no longer any signs of the house we stayed in, no doorway with its low entrance, no weeping willow or cryptomeria tree from which the caterpillars fell. The ramshackle cottage that housed my earliest friends and shaped my memories lay bare and forgotten. Only the flying termites remained, fluttering below the street lights outside the property.’ In this novella, Daribha Lyndem gently lifts the curtain on the coming of age of a young Khasi woman and the politically charged city of Shillong in which she lives. Like the beloved school game from which it takes its name, the book meanders through ages, lives and places. The interconnected stories build on each other to cover the breadth of a childhood, and move into the precarious awareness of adulthood. A shining debut, Name Place Animal Thing is an elegant examination of the porous boundaries between the adult world and that of a child’s.