The Ninth Name
A Calcutta thriller
Eleven names, in his own hand. The ninth one died.
Rudranil Chatterjee teaches philosophy in Calcutta. For twenty years he has lectured on freedom, choice and the weight of a single decision, so long as the decision belonged to someone else.
He lives by rules. Seven cigarettes a day. Old Monk at dusk. One motto: Live unnoticed.
Then someone notices him.
A typed note appears inside his private notebook. A woman he does not remember knows his timetable and his habits. And a list surfaces from February 2003, a month before the afternoon police charged the students at the Jadavpur gate. He put down his tea and walked away. A girl died that day. Someone had informed on her. The list is in his best handwriting.
As Calcutta builds its Puja pandals, and a powerful old man begins to close in on his family, a philosophy lecturer who has spent his life explaining guilt to other people must find out exactly what he is guilty of.
Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.
— Søren Kierkegaard
A dark psychological thriller of memory, complicity and the price of looking away.
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Write to the author: jj@invictahousebooks.com