Book Excerpt: The Pigeon Thief!

Author Bio :

Venkat Rajan is a seasoned management consultant in energy, engineering, and informationtechnology, with an impressive record of holding senior management roles across Asia andEurope for over two decades. With a wealth of experience from living and conducting business in overthirty countries,Venkat brings a unique perspective to fiction writing. His passion lies in delving into theintricacies of human nature and understanding how conditioning, social and cultural factorsdefine our responses. The Pigeon Thief’ marks his second foray into the world ofnovels. It will engage and evoke readers’ emotions as they travel with three different peoplefrom different strata of life, each with their own desires and aims.

Venkat Rajan loves the art of silence in storytelling and incorporates nature and landscape to enrich the narrative. He believes that readers shouldn’t just read about the gentle breeze; instead, they should feel its caress through the words they read. He brings a hint of a smile to readers’ faces in one paragraph and takes them through deeper emotions in the next. The permanency of feelings or emotions is a myth, and as humans, we are always in a transient state between emotions, which he conveys through narration and events. He also believes that if a character experiences a shock, the reader should experience the shock at the very same moment—any lapse would turn the reading into a ritual and the story into just a story, not a lived life.

Amazon link: https://amzn.eu/d/fNqMsHc

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The story is set in the late ’90s in Bombay. It captures the bond between John Smith, an Australian backpacker on a soul-searching journey, and Raju, a 12-year-old street urchin living under a masked identity to escape tormentors from the past. The duo embarks on a journey together through the streets of Bombay. Joining the duo is Reshma, a charming young girl who works in a bookstore run by a seventy-year-old Parsi man.

During one of their outings, Raju suddenly goes missing. Curious and concerned, John searches for Raju, armed with only a fragmentary and disconnected footprint in the mysterious world of street children and their haunts. The search for Raju becomes his true soul-searching journey, leading him to understand the lives of the vulnerable, the complex social structure, and the struggles faced by migrants in a big city like Bombay.

The story thematically aligns with the quote of Mother Teresa, which goes –

‘We sometimes think poverty is only being hungry, naked, and homeless. But being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for is the greatest poverty.’

Venkat Rajan believes that all street children are not delinquents but are fighting invisible forces daily!”

The extraordinary strength, and the silent narratives of the orphaned and their everyday struggles with the system, must be told and told loud enough. Raju’s struggles with the past, where he is accused of the crimehe has no inkling of, and his bonding with mid-day newspaper selling boy, Rahim, and the conversations between them, reveal the true trauma of the marginalized – their dealings with the police, their employers, the judicial system, and even with their own kind among them demand resilience of unquantifiable magnitude.

The following para from the book when Raju goes to meet his friend Aamir who lives under the Wadala bridge – exposes the life beneath the sheen of the uncared and the vulnerable in a big city!

At around 2:00 a.m., a sudden wailing sound jolted awake the sleeping folks. Aamir and a few others remained asleep, not awakened by the loud cries. A woman, a daily wage laborer, clutched her infant tight in her arms, screaming in fear and helplessness. The girl child was motionless, her eyes firmly shut. Holding her child against her chest, not letting go of her beloved soul, she ran down the empty road, crying for help in the darkness of the night. The other helpless, oppressed, and powerless merely watched. Such blank stares were all too familiar among them. What else could they do without any money, contacts, or support from the establishment? They stared at each other without any other recourse. The images and pictures of the Gods they carried in their bags remained indifferent. They became just another lowly possession to move when the homeless were shunted from one underpass to another. The woman ran barefoot on the highway, while random vehicles passed by with their headlights blinding her. She was desperate for help, but no one could do anything. She disappeared into the distance and became invisible. The blank stares of the other helpless inhabitants of the underpass persisted for a while before they returned to sleep.

Raju woke up, watched the whole scene, walked down the road, and began his steady march to the Wadala Station. He walked along the sidewalk and crossed the very spot where he had received some oblations the previous night from a devotee of Lord Hanuman. He noticed the compassionate stranger lying beneath a quilt, his face turned skyward, in a deep sleep, just before the portrait of Lord Hanuman.

John’s quest to understand the maximum city, Bombay, where he was born to Australian diplomats, drives him to learn from anyone he meets; from Happy Singh, a devout Sardar who owns the Happy Hotel in Andheri East and understand the teachings of Guru Nanak, and Raju, who becomes his little Buddha and guide in his soul-searching journey into the lives of the uncared and the orphaned. He learns from Reshma, the bookstore girl born in a Tamil family, the true meaning of love!

John apart from bringing stories back everyday to Happy Sardar after his outing, he brings a dying puppy and give it a home in Happy Hotel. It is lovingly named as Jhonny by the hotel staff and it lives in the past fear of nearly facing death trapped in unfamiliar surroundings. John helps the puppy to overcome past trauma and build a character of its own.

Embark on a journey with John, Raju, and Reshma – delve into their conversations, explore their individual lives, and witness their aspirations. A travel tale of Survival, Desires, and Love!