Out now from HarperCollins India

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The Pictures of Darpan Ray is my first contemporary novel. It’s a reimagining of The Picture of Dorian Gray, set mostly in Mumbai/Bollywood between the ‘00s and the ‘20s: a twenty-first-century vortex obsessed with youth, beauty, power, art, spirituality and conformity.

Rishi and Diya, college theatre collaborators and too-close friends, are young, talented, ambitious, and looking forward to their adult lives in a time of hope and transformation. Their unformed universe-conquest plans take a dramatic turn when their friend/former lead actor Darpan is ‘discovered’ by a Bollywood director who promises him a magical journey to immortality onscreen and off. Seduced by the glamour and energy of a world they don’t understand, Rishi and Diya decide to become screenwriters/directors themselves.

We follow, through Rishi’s eyes, Darpan’s journey to stardom and shadow. Caught between the rigid codes of a spiritual cult and the pleasure-seeking principles of a charismatic producer-director, Darpan chooses a life of hedonism that has consequences for everyone except himself. Until he believes he’s broken a supernatural pact, and his past is catching up – while his photos in a mysterious sin-catcher icon turn slowly monstrous.

As they become reluctant insiders in a world of chaos and deception, Rishi and Diya are flung together and torn apart, find their lives in disarray, their realities rearranged, and their artistic dreams annihilated by the glittering meat-grinder of the industry. As the years pass, and Bollywood churns from its global-expansion era through the streaming bubble towards the AI age, Rishi must find a way to break free and make his own victories, whatever the cost to Darpan and himself.

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Reviews

“Basu delights with his acerbic wit… a caustic, propulsive critique of a culture obsessed with perpetual youth and hollow spectacle” – The Indian Express