Sachin Kundalkar's novel reads like a scattered collection of reflections

Mint

27-07-2025

Sachin Kundalkar's new novel in translation, Silk Route, was first published in the original Marathi as Monochrome, Volume 1: Reshim Marg (2023), ostensibly as part of a projected series. Rendered into English recently by Aakash Karkare, it's as slim as the author's earlier work, Cobalt Blue, which was translated by Jerry Pinto in 2013, and inspired a film of the same name in 2022.
Apart from their brevity, the two books share other affinities. Like Tanay, one of two protagonists of Cobalt Blue, Nishikant, who is at the centre of Silk Route, is a sensitive man. He shares a tragic past with his sister Nalini, as Tanay does with his sister Anuja. Both men also grapple with their desires through their formative years. Nishikant eventually moves on from his juvenile attraction to Nikhil, Nalini's lover, to find a reciprocal love in Shiv, his roommate in college, before meeting Srinivas, the great love of his life, as a student in London.
As the story opens, Nishikant is out to find Srinivas, who has abandoned his thriving practice as a psychiatrist, his wife and family in Chennai, and disappeared. When Srinivas's wife discovers his decades-long, correspondence with his friend, she summons Nishikant for help, which leads him on a trail of sinister and mysterious happenings.
As with Cobalt Blue, Kundalkar's ambition in Silk Route is high, though it remains, sadly, unrealised. The zigzag structure of the novel, which tends to move between the past and present without adequate signposts, doesn't make it easy for the reader to follow the action. There are far too many characters, each with their own distinctive streak of subversiveness. It's hard to keep track of, or even care, for them. Unlike the emotional intensity of Cobalt Blue, which came from its focus on the inner lives of the characters, Silk Route lacks depth, direction and discipline.
It takes immense patience and skilful pacing to build interiority in fiction. Silk Route repeatedly falters on both counts. More often than not, it reads like a scattered collection of reflections—some vividly moving—rather than a cohesive attempt to build a psychological universe into which the reader would want to invest. The author also seems to trip over himself in a bid to spin his yarn as fast as he can, often hanging the plot on a scaffolding of gratuitously titillating details.
Characters like Jules, an enigmatic Frenchman, and his mysterious companion Sophia exist as riddles, left to the reader to decode. Nishikant's reckoning with the loss of his sister never gets the attention it merits. Worse, the conclusion feels gimmicky, hollow and unsympathetic. Surely, Kundalkar's characters and readers both deserve much better.