A bloody good thriller set in Maharashtra

Shreyas Rajagopal's new novel tells a compelling story of gang wars, toxic patriarchy in action, and childhoods blighted by unspeakable violence

- Somak Ghoshal

Shreyas Rajagopal, who published his first novel Saltwater (2014) under the moniker of Shrey, has emerged from a decade-long hibernation with his new book, Gunboy. And it's been worth the wait.

Set in Rannwara, the badlands of Maharashtra, it is as close to The Gangs of Wasseypur as you will get on the page. Unfolding in the same breathtaking pace as Anurag Kashyap's 2012 duology, Gunboy is a feat of storytelling—its 400-odd pages fly by before you know it—and told with a flair that standard-fare action thrillers can rarely muster.

As a hardened literary fiction reader, I didn't expect the novel to engross me as much as it did, especially with all the casual and calculated violence, blood and gore, splattered all over its pages—the book isn't for the faint-hearted or squeamish—but by the time I was done with it, it left me spent but also moved.

A major part of the appeal behind Gunboy is the craft and care with which Rajagopal builds the eponymous character, a skinny 12-year-old Tamilian boy called Arvind, who feels like a fish out of water in the suburban outpost where his father, an employee at the local steel factory, has been transferred. With his strange accent and broken Hindi, he is an outsider, rife for bullying in the hands of Jaggi Ranade, the spoilt brat of a powerful political leader. School is a waking nightmare of beatings and humiliation in the hands of Jaggi and his gang of senior boys, a reign of terror that inevitably ends in bloodshed.