Anjom

June 15, 2026 Anjom

Anjom: Book Three (Part One) : The Rama People

1. Madhapur, 2010

The Amaravati University cohort of five friends settled into Madhapur the way young tech-savvy tourists settle into a city that is, in 2010, still in the noisy middle of becoming itself. Half the buildings were beautifully constructed as iconic buildings — especially Cyber Towers, Cyber Gateway, and Vanenburg Park. The other half were sites with buildings under construction at various heights. The roads were torn at the edges as roads get torn when fiber-optic cable is being laid by three different telecommunications companies on the same Tuesday, none of whom have told the other two. The new buildings — Cyber Towers and Mindspace and several glass cubes along the road in front of them, and the half-finished tower across from the Westin Hyderabad Mindspace where Tirumala had taken, for the cohort, five connected-room serviced suites with a common area on the eighteenth floor — were so new that the developers had not, in some of them, yet decided what the lobby chandeliers would look like, and the lifts moved randomly between floors trying to figure out the optimum resting floor from which to reach customers fastest. The old buildings on the same streets were so old, and sat so low against the newly constructed and reconstructed roads — one road laid on top of the other, elevating the whole street and probably enriching the well-connected pockets along the way — that they remembered, in their stone, when this stretch of Hyderabad had been a stretch of nothing at all.

Hyderabad was, in January 2010, a city out of breath in a very particular way. The country had spent the previous eighteen months being told that the world was, in 2008, on fire.

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May 17, 2026 Anjom · Literature · Novel

Sci-fi Novel: Anjom : Book Two : The Morning Run

Part-1 : Book One : Telangana must happen!

Book Two

The Morning Run

1. Three Days West of Anywhere

They hitchhiked west, and the country did not so much pass beneath them as decline, in its polite slow way, to notice they were there. The dirt was the colour of an old brick. The grass was the colour of a brick that had been through a kiln a second time. The sky was the colour the cohort had not, in their adult lives, been able to put a name to, and after the first afternoon none of them tried.

It had been Tirumala's decision. Tirumala had, in the third hour after the crash, looked at Roy's scales catching the late sun, and at Girit's splinted wrist swinging awkwardly at her side, and at Devi's pinched, careful face, and announced that they were not going to walk. He had said it in the tone of a man closing an argument that nobody had yet started.

"Hitch," he said. "There is a road. There are trucks on the road. We are five people beside a road. The arithmetic is simple."

"Five people beside a road," Ketan said, "with a wrist, a face like a fish, and a girl who looks like she has not eaten in a week, will get arrested in any country."

"Not by an Australian truck driver," Tirumala said, with a confidence that was, like most of Tirumala's confidences, both unfounded

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May 11, 2026 Anjom · Literature · Novel

Sci-fi Novel: Anjom : Book One : Telangana must happen!

Anjom series

Chapter One

Telangana must happen!

Amaravati, Year of the Reconciliation

From the seventeenth floor of the old Secretariat - a building older than the war, older than the treaty, older than Roy's species had any right to be familiar with - Amaravati looked the way the founders had once promised it would look. White stone in the morning. Pink stone at noon. Gold stone for the half-hour before dusk, when river Krishna threw the city back at itself in a long, lazy mirror. It looked like a capital. It had finally, after everything, become one.

Earth's capital, now. Not Andhra's. Not India's. Earth's. The signs at the maglev station had been rewritten in eleven human languages and four of the seven approved Anjom scripts, and even the rewriting had been an argument. Tirumala had been in the room for that argument, though he was only nineteen at the time and had no business being there. He liked to mention it whenever the cohort needed reminding that he had business everywhere.

The University of Amaravati sat across the river, its towers built deliberately lower than the city's, as a courtesy and as a confession. A premier university now, the brochures said. Co-learning. Bridge-building. Closing the chasm. The brochures did not mention that most of the bridge-building happened underground, in a converted bunker forty meters below the music conservatory, where five students and one Professor were trying - for the third time in a decade - to do something the rest of the planet had

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