It began with the ending. Starting in his college days, Sammamish engineer Ravi Pai kept thinking about a single scene that he knew was the ending of a story. Without giving it away, it was a scene of destruction, impersonal violence and the irony of fate — but it was divorced of all context.
“Parts of the story kept circulating in my head,” Pai said “The hard part for me was elaborating on the personal details. I knew the ending, but I didn’t know who these characters were.”
Pai set out last fall to flesh out that ending and, eight months later, he released “Bold and Vulnerable in Delhi,” his freshman novel.
The end result is a book equal parts fast-paced adult crime thriller and social commentary on the status of women in Indian culture.
The story opens in media res on a murder. Four college-aged women drive into a crowded square of Delhi and pick a young man at random. One woman steadies a rifle and shoots out the window, only to hit an unintended target walking through the line of fire. They flee the scene in a panic while, unknown to them, the police cover up the murder out of convenience.
Rewind back several years: We’re introduced to the four conspirators as they begin schooling at St. Stevens College. Simran, Sweeti and Ritu are the elite scions of wealth, bureaucracy and politics, making fast friends their freshman year. Parminder — a modest student from the lower classes — is an unlikely addition to their influential circle. But, after the others rescue her from a random act of rape, they quickly bring her under their wing and introduce her to a world of Western fashions, values and all-night parties.
No matter what, Parminder cannot drown the memories of her attack. She eventually proposes a new thrill to her friends: kill someone.
“It was a random attack that affected her,” Pai said. “She’s the victim of a random act, and she wants to do something similar.”
The other girls, Pai said, are looking for the thrills alcohol, drugs and promiscuity no longer provide. They’re rich and bored and leading lives of quiet desperation.
But, digging deeper, each of the main characters wear emotional scars inflicted by men and a patriarchal society. Simran, a socialite and unrepentant hedonist, discovers a former lover is a disturbed predator. Ritu’s love life is held by the short leash of her father’s political ambitions. Sweeti is a gay woman kept in the closet by a conservative society. And, whether they know it or not, they’re all ready to spread their pain around by the time Parminder makes her indecent proposal.
“They get sucked into it,” Pai said. “They are all oppressed in some way … and there’s no real outlet for them.”
Pai refers to his first novel as a product of his naturally overactive imagination — a trait he said his wife could attest to.
A Bangalore native who came to the states in 1997, he had only been to the city of Delhi once. Thus, making it the setting of his book involved a great deal of research. Often, he would pore over online maps to determine how his characters would move from Point A to Point B.
He released the finished product on eBook platforms — it’s available on Smashwords, Amazon and Barnes & Noble, among other online stores — to put it out in the world quickly and lend himself the freedom to edit the book at any time.
