Over the Edge: A Novel

Little does Biren know that the trip he is making to Calcutta to stay in a friend’s flat, in isolation, to break through a creative block, will be the most revealing journey he has ever made into himself. His suppressed feelings will unravel themselves like strings from a ball, till finally he holds just his self…and it is in this self that he will discover that beyond the edge of cultural and societal differences there is the powerful web of connectedness kept alive by emotional and sexual bonding. This bonding subliminally connects the lives of all the characters in the story, like the underground webbing of rivers.Zady, his friend and part-time lover, will play her role in connecting seemingly unrelated characters. There is Pepita, Popularly known as Ma G Spot; Maria, the Hawaiian-born wanderer conceived by hippy parents; Clarissa, the Swedish bombshell; Kimiki, the tiny Japanese; the wispy silent Sakoontala who communicates with her bamboo flute and her unusually responsive body; Benito, the Italian big-mouth; Swami Anandaneshwar, a massage specialist, and the mysterious Swami Arjuna.Zady’s apartment block is alive with all sorts of characters. There’s Baby Vienna with his delectably sexy and dyning-to-be-made-pregnant wife Sherry who latches on to Biren; her sister Patsy; their friends-the enormous Roddy and his itsy bitsy wife Tootsie; and Father Patrick, the parish priest, who has seen and experienced the inside as well as the outside of everyone in the block, literally.Woven into the story is the powerful presence of the old man next door-Joseph Mellow, a closet writer, visited by near psychic experiences who has an undeniable impact on Biren and on the relationship between the characters.The narrative is simple, colourful and oft times brutally honest, as it unravels from the point of view of the various characters, in first person. It weaves its way through the inner and outer worlds of these characters and evolves into a breathtaking emotional and sexual fugue. This is a novel about arrivals and departures and those sacred moments when kindred souls find each other…it’s about finding when not searching, about arriving even when you think that you have not set out.