Shanti

About the book

Everyone knows the woman who waits at the sea wall with two cups. Nobody asked where she learned to wait.

Pune, two lanes from the quiet, careful Sharma family: Shanti grows up in the loud house, where people argue and love in the same breath, no announcement made. A borrowed camera becomes her first language, a way to say what she sees before she has the words for it.

At eighteen she says the true thing aloud, on an ordinary Sunday over breakfast, because loud is the only register her house understands. What follows is not a slammed door but something colder: a season in which her room is still hers, but the table no longer is. An apprenticeship at a photo studio gives her a trade and the courage to leave, and Mumbai takes her in the way it takes everyone, indifferent and generous at once.

Shanti is the other half of the Bound by Mumbai story, told from the inside: a whole woman with her own wanting and her own history, long before she became the person who holds the light.

For readers who love

Literary sapphic coming-of-age · desi and South Asian settings · found family and chosen family · photography, craft and the courage to look · stories told from the quieter friend's point of view.

Content note

A closed-door romance with moderate heat. Themes include coming out to family, a period of estrangement, first love and finding independence in a big city.

Book details

More in this series

Shanti is Volume Five of Bound by Mumbai, a ten-volume series by Meera Kane, and opens Part Two. It tells the story that runs beside Priya's Surrender from Shanti's side. Start with the free prequel novella What We Never Said at Dawn if you want to meet them first.