Jaipur Literature Festival: Post Narcopolis, another Mumbai novel creates buzz

Shreyas Rajagopal, 28, makes it clear at the outset that his book is not about a bunch of kids smoking a joint and listening to Pink Floyd. It is about hooking up with the wrong person because you are on heavier, harder things. Set in South Bombay, Salt Water follows the story of the children of India’s elite, “presenting a raw, uncut footage of an entire generation losing it, together, one shiny party at a time”.

This is a generation that already has everything one aspires for —  cars, money and beautiful girls. A generation that is lost and is interacting with each other with increasing violence, not always physical but also psychological. The book is slated to release in February by Penguin and may just be the next big book in the “young India” genre.

Rajagopal says the book draws a lot from the stuff he saw growing up in South Bombay and his friend’s experiences. There’s a lot of magic pills, random sex and endless parties. “It’s very easy to say ‘oh, look at these rich kids doing stupid things’. But this world presented a lot of questions to me and I try to give them a voice,” he says.

The protagonist, Rish, sees the fakeness of the world he lives in but he doesn’t have the strength of character to give up the parties and the beautiful girls. One of the great laments he deals with is the “death of romance” in a culture of “hook-ups”. “There used to be these ideas about the one love that would rescue you. Now, you have your first heart break at the age of 14, then at 17. By the time you are 20, you are already jaded and get together with people for entirely selfish reasons,” says Rajagopal.

His agent Marc Parent — the Indophile French literary agent who has published French translations of Indian writers in English including Pankaj Mishra and Gurcharan Das — has already sold the rights to a German publisher in a “five-figure” deal (Euro).