Taboo  (English, Paperback, Govindarajan Nirmala)

‘This is a book that blends genres and defies description. Its style is deceptively playful but it conceals as much as it reveals the horrors beneath the surface’ JERRY PINTO ‘There’s music, sex, the scent of forgotten flowers and the search for lost mothers. Taboo is a stylised, lyrical, often macabre urban adventure about love, abandonment, power and the persistence of memory. Audaciously defying boundaries to weave in and out of genres, languages, cultures, myths and realities, it tells a remarkable story of today’s India and its people’ ANTARA DEV SEN ‘Taboo travels between places, languages, and characters to map a searing and humane story’ HANSDA SOWVENDRA SHEKHAR Erendira, the protagonist of this heart-rending tale of exploitation and the imagination of freedom, is symbolic of the under-aged trafficking networks and its resilient survivors across India. In Taboo, metred into rhythm in her inimitable style, Nirmala Govindarajan plunges into the context of disturbing crime, trafficking and unfreedom. Flying high in the Himalayan ranges, weaving a trail through Coimbatore, Ooty, Chandigarh, Khandala and the shipping town of Alang, diving down to the southern-most tip of India and onwards to Sri Lanka, Erendira, through many languages and cultures unearths the forbidden identity of a sex worker on a footpath. Finally, you emerge questioning the intent of our society and political organizations to stop this and the utter disregard for such questions in our democracy.