Book Title: Our Friends in Good Houses: A Novel
Author: Rahul Pandita
Publisher: Fourth Estate India
Number of Pages: 236
ISBN: 978-9369895410
Date Published: Oct. 13, 2025
Price: INR 395
Book Excerpt
Pages 7 and 8
Neel always believed that it was the greatest responsibility of men to escape the inevitability of their fate—to break away from the path that others, who had come before, had ordained for them. They had to cleave their own passage, even if it meant the white of bone showed on their elbows.
It had taken him twenty-five years to carve his own path, to move out of the orbit his personal history had put him into. It was this impetus, for a future of his own making, that had made the fellowship at Yale possible.
And then, the time had come to return. He did not resist the return; he knew it had to happen. His life was in India;it was here, over the last two decades, that he had witnessed things ordinary men only learnt of from the newspapers or remained oblivious to all their lives. It had taken grit and a persistent fight against the whale of fate trying to swallow him and make him stew in its dark belly of ordinariness.
He had gone to places in the countryside that were in the throes of civil war. In one of these, there had been a protracted fight between the state and a ragtag army of rebels who wanted to overthrow the existing order. The rebel leaders said they were doing it for the sake of the indigenous people living there. The state had exploited these people, and now the leaders, who mostly came from cities, had come to fight on their behalf so that they could get justice. It took him time to realize that in a war everyone eventually becomes unjust.
He did not know it then, but it came to him later, that by throwing himself in the middle of such tumultuous events, where death (or life) held no value, he was trying to make sense of the emptiness that the Ungrund had sowed inside him. More than that, he was trying to ward off the feeling that he was doomed to come back to a home that was not his idea of home at all. It was the return to this feeling that he resisted when the time to leave Yale came close, not the idea of return itself.
At that time, he would not have imagined Annie offering him a way out, or that he would not be able to take it and, as a consequence, return first to a home that did not feel like home at all, and then go back to the war zone.
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Excerpted with permission from Our Friends in Good Houses by Rahul Pandita, published by Fourth Estate India.
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