Lost and Found

At a drunken party, the young and striking Lakshmi kidnaps a journalist named Placid Hari. She believes he is the man who raped her sixteen years earlier. By morning she has realised the scale of what she has done, but events overtake them both. Terrorists have laid siege to Bombay, and Lakshmi and Hari are taken hostage alongside a teenage actor who is just starting out.

The man in charge of the hostages is Salim, a boy soldier trained in Pakistan by Abul Razak. Razak's hallucinatory obsession is Salim's own mother. As the day wears on, Salim discovers that nothing in his upbringing has prepared him for the deadly turns his mission takes.

Cooped up with their captor, the hostages tell their stories, full of blood and tears. Salim finds himself drawn into them, and C P Surendaran builds the novel around that encounter between a young militant and the people he holds.