Prayaag Akbar's debut novel, 'Leila', is just about 200 pages. But it's enough to tell a story, a powerful one of a futuristic India where society has been ghettoised and compartmentalised, and conformity and conditioning are the norm.
Weaving a past and a present continuous, Akbar, through his heroine, Shalini, draws a fictional India where an inter-caste union knows no joy. And as she stays resilient in the search for her missing daughter, she realises that the State has much control over human behaviour, and a prescription of moral codes for its citizens.
As I sit down to chat with him over iced tea at Cafe Turtle in Delhi's upscale Khan Market, the bearded Akbar looks relaxed. Dressed in khaki shorts and a striped shirt, he doesn't look nervous at all. There is an air of powerful calm about him.
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"In today's India, there are forces at work which are beyond our immediate control. There are huge, overarching political changes that can have personal ramifications, and can go on to devastate lives," he says.
And that is something that Akbar's heroine, Shalini, discovers as the loss of her daughter pushes her to a brink in an increasingly insulated society festered with walls and self-imposed boundaries.
If the 'Hunger Games' series had districts, 'Leila' has Camps and Purity One, symbolic zones that are closed structures, with tremendous male pride about the honour of women. And, that, says the 30-something writer is an uncomfortable truth about "our already-dystopian cities".
"For so many people that's the lived reality of our cities: there are safe zones where one can go and then there are places where one can't venture if one is not of a certain type. What bothers me is the fact that we don't have a problem living with it," he says.
These are not new trends and have been around for decades now, he adds. But he has tried to capture the overall decay - of cities, values and lives - in his own words and through his own world (including house-hunting for a Muslim man with a Christian wife).
And while the novel's core theme of the mother-daughter bonding and subsequent separation germinated in the country's political capital, other parts of the story came to him at different times when he moved to Mumbai three years ago.
"All of the writing happened in Mumbai. The urban decay in Mumbai is very visibly stark while in Delhi it is more sanitised, and that kind of became the narrative," Akbar says, referring to the influence the two cities had on his story.
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