Vanity Bagh – Anees Salim
Inside every big Indian city, there is a tiny Pakistan.
Inspired by the legend of Abu Hathim, aging don of Vanity Bagh, Imran Jabbari and his friends form a gang called 5½ Men in their mohalla of Vanity Bagh. They are hired to
dispense a batch of stolen scooters to different corners of the city; not until the city rocks with scooter bombs does Imran realize that they have been involved in a terrorist act.
One of the prime accused in the 11/11 serial blasts, Imran is destined to live in captivity for the next fourteen years. He kills time plotting jailbreak until he is assigned to the bookmaking section of the prison. The new job equips him with a new facility: each time he opens a book and stares at its blank pages, he sees them scribbled with tales from Vanity Bagh. Imran thus traces the history of animosity between Vanity Bagh, nicknamed Little Pakistan, and Mehendi, a Hindu neighbourhood.
After a year of marriage—and numerous adventures—Lady Julia and Brisbane hope for a quiet, intimate Christmas together—until they find themselves at her father’s ancestral estate, Bellmont Abbey, with her eccentric family and a menagerie of animals.
The beautiful, immature girl whom she took home to her husband was a maid only in name. Tomo’s real mission had been to find him a mistress. Nor did her secret humiliation end there. The web that his insatiable lust spun about him soon trapped another young woman, and another … and the relationships between the women thus caught were to form, over the years, a subtle, shifting pattern in which they all played a part. There was Suga, the innocent, introspective girl from a respectable but impoverished family; the outgoing, cheerful, almost boyish Yumi; the flirtatious, seductive Miya, who soon found her father-in-law more dependable as a man than his brutish son…. And at the centre, rejected yet dominating them all, the near-tragic figure of the wife Tomo, whose passionate heart was always, until that final day, held in check by an old-fashioned code.
In the wake of the Battle of Waterloo, the Bourbon court in Paris and their victorious allies give lavish parties while the Royalists are quick to exact vengeance for everything since the Revolution. Countless Bonapartists are arrested and executed in what comes to be known as the White Terror. In this seething atmosphere British attaché and spy Malcolm Rannoch learns that his murdered half-sister, Princess Tatiana Kirsanova, may have left behind a secret child in Paris; a child who may now be in grave danger.
