Carnal prose it says on the cover. And you give five extra marks mentally. How many authors of Indian origin would gladly choose the subject? And a book of short stories it is, too.

Are Indians living abroad more Indian than Indians living in India? Straight off the bat, the blurb tells you that “six yards of silk connect India and New Zealand”. That does sort of offer an instant solution to why the book is called so. Unfortunately, we do like a little bit of mystery

No words raise alarm flags that say “desperate attempt to be crossover” or “was Indian in previous birth” than “Karma”. Then the blurb talks about “vast landscape”.

Most of us who gravitate towards the section marked “thriller” in a bookstore have grown up with all kinds of crime novels littered with corpses, cops, conspiracies and crummy detectives that figured out whodunit. The Hindi audiences have had pulp crime novels to read when travelling in trains for years. A Chennai-based publisher has translated Tamil pulp for those who have been waiting to read a good blood and gore tale in English.

The blurb asks a very simple question, “Why are you afraid?” The answer is not as easy as we think. Some people dream of death, of fires and drowning.