Book Review: Twice in Nalanda
A second chance… Two bus hijacks with more or less the same bunch of passengers involved. How will they react? Have the passengers, who are also neighbours, learnt anything from the burden on their conscience from the first episode? Or they care more about their person, to hell with the consequences? Twice in Nalanda may sound like a classic thriller. But it digs deeper, to find out about people’s equation with death. The choices they make when a pistol is pointed at their temple by the hijacker or the thoughts they harbour about bumping off their neighbour. Twice in Nalanda talks about the journey that residents of Nalanda housing society undertake every day, in a cream and red minibus, to their workplace in Nariman Point, Mumbai. The journey is omniscient narrator here. It not only details the daily drudge of the commute, but about the transformative passage that the residents of Nalanda undergo within the timespan of the two incidents - November 1998 and November 2024. ...