Muhammad bin Tughlaq, the Sultan of Dihli, is outraged. Someone has stolen his favourite dessert, the sugared melons from Khurasim. What's worse, people are questioning his plans of torture and punishment. Who can help the Sultan solve this mystery?

Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi’s last published work Mirages of the Mind traces an arc of nostalgia between Pakistan and India. Its main characters—Indian Muslim immigrants to Pakistan—reminisce about and long for an impossible return to their pre-Partition life in India. The book’s lightly fictionalized anecdotes, both humorous and poignantly sad, form a treasure trove of the arcana and subtle differences of twentieth-century Muslim life in the subcontinent. A cultural memoir, multi-layered biography, and anecdotal chain, Mirages of the Mind chronicles a milieu that has all but disappeared. Its narratives portray the hardships, heartbreak, and humour of colonial north-Indian Muslim life and its subsequent forms in post-colonial India and Pakistan. The book’s central character Basharat serves the role of a wise fool—equally ridiculous and full of penetrating, bizarre sense. Basharat’s tales about his friends paint a rare, and perhaps the last, authentic picture of the literary and cultural life of South Asia’s Urdu speakers. The first Urdu anthologies recalled the lives of poets exclusively in anecdotes. With Mirages of the Mind, Mushtaq Ahmed Yousufi rekindles this form and briefly illuminates the beauty of a culture that is fast receding into the darkness of the past.

Has anyone ever asked you—What were the best days of your life? That one period of your life you always wanted to go back to? And live that life . . . one more time? When asked this, I closed my eyes and went back in my own past. And I thought . . . . . . of the days, when life's most complex choices had a simple solution of Akkad Bakkad Bambey Bo! . . . of the seasons when rains were celebrated by making paper boats. . . . of the times when waiting at the railway crossing meant counting the bogies of the train passing by. When I opened my eyes, it seems Like it Happened Yesterday! Like it was yesterday that I broke my first tooth and fell in love for the first time. Like it was yesterday, when I was about to lose my friend, and suddenly he became my best friend. I look back and it becomes a journey full of adventure. It makes me laugh, it makes me cry and I know I’m here because I was . . . Come, hold my hand, and take this trip with me. It will be yesterday for you, once again!

As India gears up for its seventeenth Lok Sabha elections in 2019, the Election Commission of India, responsible for conducting elections in the country, marks the beginning of its seventieth year. This book commemorates the occasion, celebrating seven decades of the country's vibrant electoral democracy. With essays written by prominent analysts, politicians, academics, psephologists, former chief election commissioners, and many others, The Great March of Democracy covers a range of subjects from the birth and evolution of the Election Commission, the exciting story of the first electoral roll and the first general elections, to the criminalization of politics, electoral reforms, and so on.

At the onset of her getaway to the hills of Himachal Pradesh in a secluded tourist spot, Writer's Hill, Nisha knew something terrible was going to happen. Less than seventy-two hours later, she goes missing under mysterious circumstances. When the police arrive and question the co-inhabitants, they're surprised at their statements. All of them describe an eerie, almost supernatural, occurrence on the night of Nisha's disappearance. To add to the strangeness is a unique coterie of travellers-Nisha's ignorant boyfriend, a reclusive but nosy writer and a young couple who are not what they seem. There is also the caretaker's visually impaired daughter who claims she can 'see things'. With barely any leads, the police know they have to work doubly hard if they want to find Nisha, but with each passing day, the mystery around her disappearance gets murkier. Where is Nisha?

A fascinating account of the Muslims in twentieth-century India, Pakistan and Bangladesh through his biographical sketches of eight prominent Muslims— Sayyid Ahmed Khan (1817-1898), Fazlul Haq (1873-1962), Muhammad Ali Jinnah (1876-1948), Muhammad Iqbal (1876-1938), Muhammad Ali (1878-1931), Abul Kalam Azad (1888-1958), Liaqat Ali Khan (1895-1951) and Zakir Hussain (1897-1969) Rajmohan Gandhi, the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, provides a deeply insightful and comprehensive picture of the community in the subcontinent today.

Horse of Karbala is a study of Muharram rituals and interfaith relations in three locations in India: Ladakh, Darjeeling, and Hyderabad. These rituals commemorate an event of vital importance to Shia Muslims: the seventh-century death of the Imam Husain, grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, at the battlefield of Karbala in Iraq. Pinault examines three different forms of ritual commemoration of Husain's death - poetry-recital and self-flagellation in Hyderabad; stick-fighting in Darjeeling; and the 'Horse of Karbala' procession, in which a stallion representing the mount ridden in battle by Husain is made the center of a public parade in Ladakh and other Indian localities. The book looks at how publicly staged rituals serve to mediate communal relations: in Hyderabad and Darjeeling, between Muslim and Hindu populations; in Ladakh, between Muslims and Buddhists. Attention is also given to controversies within Muslim communities over issues related to Muharram such as the belief in intercession by the Karbala Martyrs on behalf of individual believers.