Book review: Shreyas Rajagopal's Gunboy is a revenge saga soaked in style, swagger, and schoolyard bruises

Hindustan Times

10 hours ago

Right from the word go, Gunboy fires off from all cylinders. It's a bullet-laced bildungsroman tangled in a gun-slinging revenge drama. It's a tale that knows exactly what it wants to be. It's fast, familiar, and never pretends otherwise. The cover of Shreyas Rajagopal's second novel Gunboy
Set in Maharashtra's Rannwara, we meet Arvind and Sudipto, two schoolboys — one scraping by, one rich — both bruised by the same schoolyard tyrant, Jaggi. Their days are stitched together with fear, until the infamous hitman Amar Singh drifts into town with a stash of guns and the swagger of a Hindi crime classic. And that's when they meet Gun. Not a gun. The Gun — gleaming white, gold-dipped, and blessed by Lord Hanuman himself.
Until this point, the novel gives you a tender, observant peek into the kind of childhood pain that adults dismiss, but for the children never really disappears. But then, the tempo shifts and the prose tightens. The story steps into the now-familiar visual territory of a streaming thriller. You might imagine the alternating POVs of Manoj Bajpayee and Nawazuddin Siddiqui of Gangs of Wasseypur playing these characters. It could be a coincidence, or maybe it's the echo chamber of every OTT screen we've been glued to for the last five years. But let's be clear: just because it feels familiar doesn't mean it's forgettable.
Author Shreyas Rajagopal, in his second fictional outing, knows how to build style. The action is crisp and the pace is addictive. There's a mythology-tinted mystery around the Gun that keeps the intrigue burning. This willingness to blend myth, memory, and machismo in the same breath is what makes it interesting. The Gun itself is treated less as a weapon and more as a relic, complete with the ethereal calibre of a talisman that has been blessed by the gods.
This straddling of pulp stylisation and spiritual symbolism injects a surreal charge into an otherwise grounded tale. That is a gamble, since those expecting gritty realism may find the mystical charge going against this world of Maharashtra's street politics. But it does deepen the novel's folklore quality. By daring to place divine iconography in the crosshairs of a crime saga, this is not just about boys and bullets, but also about the myths we build as a people to survive violence of all natures.
But where the book falters is in its (unsurprising) lack of female voices. There is only one female voice and POV — Srilekha — and she is barely given the space that she deserves, especially in a story this testosterone-heavy.
Still, Gunboy doesn't try to be revolutionary. It wants to entertain and makes no promises it doesn't keep. You can flip through this read in a single sitting, be it on a flight, in bed, or during a lazy monsoon afternoon. Pick up a copy not to chase the new, but to enjoy the familiar done with flair. A good cliche is still a good story.
Title: Gunboy
Author: Shreyas Rajagopal
Publisher: HarperCollins India
Price: ₹499
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