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?

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!

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.

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.

The Rapids of a Great River begins with selections from the earliest known Tamil poetry dating from the second century CE. The writings of the Sangam period laid the foundation for the Tamil poetic tradition, and they continue to underlie and inform the works of Tamil poets even today. The first part of this anthology traverses the Sangam and bhakti periods and closes with pre-modern poems from the nineteenth century. The second part, a compilation of modern and contemporary poetry, opens with the work of the revolutionary poet Subramania Bharati. Breaking free from prescriptions, the new voices—which include Sri Lankan Tamils, women and dalits, among others—address the contemporary reader; the poems, underscored by a sharp rhetorical edge, grapple with the complexities of the modern political and social world. The selection is wide-ranging and the translations admirably echo the music, pace and resonance of the poems. This anthology links the old with the new, cementing the continuity of a richly textured tradition. There is something in the collection for every reader and each will make his or her own connections—at times startling, at other times familiar.

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.