Jet City Womanby Ankush SaikiaRupaPrice: Rs 195; Pages: 190Ankush Saikia’s protagonist is bored. He doesn’t enjoy being a newspaper sub-editor. “The paths in life we do not take—whether out of our own choice or of others—was playing on my mind,” he says at the start of the novel, as he hangs around at the opening of an art exhibition in Delhi. It’s the big city where he has lived for years www.timberlandsapatilhas.net, first as a drifting university student and then as a newspaperman. It’s miles away from his native Shillong www.jackorcanadagooses.com, and he’s driven, like his fellow-north-easterners, to desultory days of drinking and chasing delicacies like chilly beef.The only element of interest is TV anchor Naina. Once the two shared pink gins and passionate nights. Then Naina moved on, leaving our protagonist from the periphery obsessed. He’s still brooding and besotted www.mulberrytilbudoutlet.com, when Naina re-enters. She invites the peeved journalist to keep her company while she interviews a French winemaker (brandishing her kajal pencil, she says, “A female reporter’s greatest asset; I never go anywhere without it”). Later, she hangs out in a hotel room with a shady Afghan drug dealer www.nikefreestorede.com, leaving the protagonist bemused and bedazzled. There’s a mystery as well, and some social commentary on the dotcom boom and bust. But all of this www.abercrombienfitchshop.com, including the love story that never was, fails to grip. Like friend Bashan says, “Man, how many times you’ll repeat that story? Stop talking about her, okay?”Definitely not a book I would read either for the story or for the story telling, or even for the north-eastern backdrop which, doled out in stereotyped images of “chinks” on bikes in search of beer and beef www.canadagoosejakkeparka.dk, fails to capture the tragic splendour of the beautiful land and its people. 

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