A guide to survival in a teetering world

Eight friends on their way up to Class XII with their fill of dating and undating and fights and fall outs. At that stage life is meant to go on forever, but it doesn’t. Ananya, the one everyone thought was there to change the world, doesn’t wake up one morning and her friends are shattered. Especially since the book opens juicily with a break-up between Kavya and Siddharth that no one really knows what to do with since the friends belong to the same group.

In the next chapter, there is no more Ananya and dealing with her loss, Veera and Siddharth discover an exquisite blue shoebox which contains sealed letters. One addressed to each of her friends.

Anusha Subramaniam uses Ananya’s letters as a device. Letters that were never meant to be read because obviously no 17-year-old thinks he or she is going to die. However, in this case the letters are read and all of them have some bearing on their relationships with each other and the way they are.

In this young adults’ world fakery treads a very fine line from the real thing. Though no one is into selfie taking or social media — a strange miss in this book — they are all worried about appearances. And Ananya has the advantage of revealing her insights about each of her friends without being there to be blamed for unnecessary truth telling.

As one of India’s youngest writers, Subramaniam knows her world and its eggshell thin dividing line between parents and dates. Opinions matter on both sides — Nikhilesh has to realise that his father loves him but only Kavya, the seemingly snooty social butterfly, can help him do that — and Subramaniam’s set of parents are fairly lenient for the most part, taking in sights like their daughter being fed naan by a boy in their drawing room.

Whether life is actually like this of course remains to be debated — most mothers are likely to yell blue murder. Also Subramaniam’s world seems to include no devoted domestics running after baby with hair scrunches and other mislaid items of finery, not to mention acting as post boxes for love letters. But then reality from an adult perspective is not what this book is about.

Subramaniam’s is a guide to survival in a teetering world where nothing is really assured except that we are all stardust and that dead friends continue to glitter down from a blue velvet sky making everything all right.

Anjana Basu is the author of Rhythms of Darkness