Black Hole is not so difficult

This is about my own book, the only novel I have written so far: Black Hole. It was published just a few weeks back at Amazon as an e-book.

I'm sorry if I appear to be pushing it aggressively and unabashedly. Like every writer, I would love to have as many readers as possible. A few readers have told me that the book is slightly difficult. I agree. I didn't intentionally make it difficult. But I didn't intend to write a simple novel either. If life is convoluted, can literature be easy?

Let me tell you how Black Hole is structured so that your reading it will become easier. There are 6 chapters. Chapters 1,3, and 5 are about Devlok Ashram and its godmen. The first godman is Kailashputar Boprai whose nights were "haunted by nondescript phantoms" until he found peace in being a godman. He is succeeded by much inferior minds (inferior hearts, rather) in the persons of Amarjeet and Nityananda (who was originally Nitin Jane/Jain). Like any establishment, Devlok suffers degeneration and the godmen are far from being god's men. Their influential followers or supporters have their own vested interests. Sitaram Rana is one such person who establishes Kailash Public School adjacent to Devlok, on lands captured illegally from the Asola wilderness.

Chapters 2 and 4 are about Kailash Public School and Ishan, the protagonist of the novel, is an English teacher in that school. Ishan is a man with a history. History keeps haunting him sometimes even in the form of the shadow of the country's Pradhan Sevak. The phantoms in his life will haunt him till the end and the end is in the company of a Muslim stand-up comedian and an aged Christian priest suffering from Parkinson's disease... The last chapter brings Devlok Ashram and Kailash Public School together.

While Kailash Baba's quest started with the death of Lala Lajpat Rai, the novel ends in contemporary India of the Pradhan Sevak. It spans a whole century in about a hundred pages. The periods are clear from the historical events that merge into the plot's fiction time and again. Anyone can check up the historical events easily from Google's endless resources though I think most of them are self-evident. Only those who need to read deeply into the novel require Google. Others need a little patience, that's all.

I hope this introduction from the author will make some sense to those who wish to read the novel. Best wishes - to you and me.

Comments

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below. Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Chhattisgarh Story

Deforestation in Chhattisgarh Kerala’s Catholic Church is teeming with rage these days because of the arrest of two nuns in Chhattisgarh on false charges. No one seems to understand the real politics behind the Modi government’s enmity towards Christian missionaries in Chhattisgarh as well as other backward states in its neighbourhood. Modi is selling the tribal areas and forestlands to the corporate sector part by part, his friend Adani being the chief benefactor. The Christian missionaries are a severe hindrance in that commerce. Let us get some facts right, at least. The Adivasi villagers allege that Gram Sabhas (local governing bodies) were forged or manipulated under pressure from Adani and the BJP government officials in order to take away their lands. In Hasdeo Aranya, minutes of the local body meetings were altered to show the villagers’ consent for land transfers. Also, the Chhattisgarh Scheduled Tribes Commission found that Panchayat secretaries were detained and coerc...

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala: The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

Tomichan Matheikal's blog

Search This Blog