If aliens arrived tomorrow, what’s the first thing you’d ask them?

Take Me to Your Leader? Actually, Can You Look at My Wi-Fi First?

If a gleaming, hyper-dimensional starship were to descend upon Earth tomorrow—parting the clouds with a hum that rattles our collective teeth—humanity’s philosophical heavyweights would undoubtedly step forward. Philosophers would ask about the meaning of life. Scientists would inquire about faster-than-light travel. World leaders would nervously ask about trade agreements, secretly hoping extraterrestrial tax havens exist.

​Me? I have a far more pressing, existential question for our new cosmic overlords:

​“Look, before we do the whole peace-offering ceremony… do you happen to know why my printer constantly says it’s offline when it’s connected with a cable?”

​Let’s be honest. If an alien species possesses the technology to cross trillions of miles of interstellar void without getting lost, running out of fuel, or succumbing to space-boredom, they must have solved the fundamental annoyances of existence. Forget quantum gravity; I want to tap into their vast, superior wisdom for the mundane horrors of daily life on Earth.

​Once we clear up the printer issue, my follow-up questions are already lined up in strict order of importance:

​1. “Did you bring your own plastic bags, or do you want to pay 10p for ours?”

​Nothing says “Welcome to Earth” like immediately subjecting supreme beings to supermarket checkout admin. Imagine a giant, glowing, multi-tentacled organism trying to awkwardly stuff a bundle of intergalactic celery into a flimsy bag that rips at the bottom. It’s the ultimate equalizer.

​2. “Who actually decided that self-checkout tills need to yell at us about unexpected items?”

​If their civilization has developed artificial intelligence capable of steering through asteroid belts, surely they can explain why a 50g packet of crisps in the bagging area triggers a red flashing light and a public humiliation protocol. If they tell me their planet also suffers from “Unexpected Item in Bagging Area,” I’m voting we send them straight back into the abyss.

​3. “Is there a universe where fitted bed sheets actually fold neatly?”

​Earth scientists have mapped the human genome and photographed black holes, yet no human being since the dawn of time has ever folded a fitted sheet without turning it into a sad, lumpy fabric ball. If the extraterrestrials can demonstrate a seamless four-corner fold, I will personally crown them ruler of the Milky Way.

​4. “Did you park that UFO on a double yellow line?”

​Because if you did, mate, the local council doesn’t care if you have plasma cannons. You’re getting a £70 fine, reduced to £35 if you pay within fourteen days.

​The Ultimate Truth

​We like to imagine First Contact as a grand, cinematic moment full of dramatic music and profound exchanges of galactic wisdom. But if an advanced alien race has spent millennia observing us from afar, they aren’t coming to destroy us. They’re coming because our planet is the universe’s top-tier reality television show.

​So when the ramp lowers and the shimmering beings step out into the light, don’t ask them for the secrets of the cosmos. Ask them if they’ve got a spare HDMI cable, because the rest of us have been using the wrong input channel for three decades.

The Quiet Superpowers: 9 Underrated Life Skills They Never Taught You in School

What’s the most underrated life skill?

The Quiet Superpowers: 9 Underrated Life Skills They Never Taught You in School

We obsess over the big skills — coding, public speaking, leadership, learning a second language. They look excellent on a CV, but they rarely determine whether you have a calm morning, a strong marriage, or a peaceful mind at 10 p.m.

The real quality of life is decided by the small, unfashionable skills. The ones no one applauds. Here are the most underrated ones I have come to value.

1. The Art of Doing Nothing Productively
   We call it boredom and try to kill it with scrolling. In truth, the ability to sit alone without stimulation — no phone, no podcast, no task — is where your mind finally defragments itself. That is where good ideas arrive. Ten minutes a day of intentional idleness is not laziness; it is maintenance.
2. Saying No Without Writing an Essay
   Most of us say yes to avoid awkwardness and then resent the commitment. A graceful, brief no — “I can’t take that on this week, but I wish you well with it” — protects your time without damaging the relationship. It is kindness with boundaries.
3. Repairing Things
   Knowing how to sew on a button, fix a leaking tap, oil a hinge, or troubleshoot a slow laptop saves you more money and frustration in a year than most side-hustles earn. It also teaches you patience and gives you a quiet confidence: I can figure this out.
4. Managing Your Energy, Not Just Your Time
   Time management is well-known. Energy management is not. You have 24 hours, but you do not have 24 hours of high focus. The underrated skill is noticing when you are sharp, when you are flat, and organising your day accordingly. Difficult conversations and creative work when you are fresh. Admin and errands when you are not.
5. Listening to Understand, Not to Reply
   We listen to prepare our answer. Try listening to truly understand what the other person is trying to say, especially when you disagree. Paraphrase it back: “So what you are saying is…” It diffuses 90% of conflicts in families, friendships, and workplaces.
6. Being Comfortable With Being Wrong
   The ability to say, “I was wrong about that, thank you for correcting me,” without embarrassment is a superpower. It makes you more trustworthy, more teachable, and far easier to be around. Stubbornness feels strong; adaptability actually is.
7. Asking for Help Early
   We wait until we are drowning to ask for help, when asking early would have meant a five-minute favour. The skilled person asks before the deadline, before the burnout, before the small leak becomes a flood. It is a sign of self-respect, not weakness.
8. Regulating Your Own Mood
   Not controlling emotions — regulating them. Knowing how to calm yourself down after an annoyance, how to lift yourself out of a slump with a walk, water, or a change of scenery, rather than outsourcing that job to other people or to food, drink, and shopping.
9. Finishing What You Start — Even Badly
   Perfectionism keeps us starting. Maturity is finishing. A mediocre completed draft, a finished cupboard tidy, a walk completed even if it was short. The habit of closing loops builds self-trust.

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None of these will trend on social media. There is no certificate for them. But practise one for a fortnight and you will feel the difference in your daily peace.

If you had to pick just one to work on this month, which one would quietly improve your life the most?

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The Sentence That Saved Me: My Philosophy Is Simple — Do Your Bit, Detach From the Noise

What’s a personal mantra or philosophy you live by?

The Sentence That Saved Me: My Philosophy Is Simple — Do Your Bit, Detach From the Noise

If you had asked me for my life philosophy in my thirties, I would have given you a complicated answer. Something about success, ambition, five-year plans, and proving a point to the world.

Today, at 65, it fits into one line.

Do your best, and let go of the rest.

That is it. That is the mantra I try to live by. Not every day perfectly, but every day sincerely.

It sounds almost too simple, doesn’t it? We live in a world that loves complex formulas for happiness — seven habits, ten rules, twelve steps. But I have found that life does not reward complexity. It rewards clarity.

This philosophy did not come from a book. It came from life quietly teaching me the same lesson until I finally listened.

1. Do Your Bit, Properly

In our scriptures, it is said far more beautifully: Karmanye vadhikaraste — you have a right to your action, not to its fruit.

For years, I got this backwards. I worried about the fruit. Will this project be appreciated? Will this person reciprocate? Will this effort be recognised?

That worry made me anxious and, quite frankly, less effective. The moment I shifted my focus to just doing my bit — with honesty, with diligence, with care — a strange calm came over me.

Whether it is writing an article, helping a younger colleague, or just tending to my morning walk, I ask myself one question: Did I do this as well as I could, with the right intention? If the answer is yes, my job is done.

The result is not my business. My effort is.

2. Detach From the Noise

The second half — let go of the rest — is harder. Much harder.

We cannot control people’s opinions, the market, health scares, or how our children choose to live their lives. We can only control our response to them.

Earlier in life, I carried everything. If someone was upset, I felt responsible. If a plan failed, I replayed it for days. I was living in results that had not even happened yet.

Detachment is not indifference. It is not saying “I don’t care.” It is saying “I care deeply, but I will not let what I cannot control destroy my peace.”

I have learned to do what is needed and then step back. To give advice when asked, but not force it. To work hard, but not tie my self-worth to the outcome. It is a daily practice, not a final achievement.

3. Why This Philosophy Works, Especially Now

In this later chapter of life, this mantra has become my anchor.

When your body does not recover as quickly, when you see friends face difficult times, when you realise time is finite — you understand that peace is not a luxury. It is a necessity.

Doing your best keeps you useful, engaged, and self-respecting. Letting go of the rest keeps you sane, humble, and free.

It has improved my relationships. I listen more and expect less. It has improved my health. I sleep better when I am not arguing with life in my head. And it has made my work more joyful, because I write and create for the love of doing it, not for the anxiety of how it will be received.

You do not need to control the ocean to avoid drowning. You just need to learn to float.

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So that is my philosophy: Do your bit with integrity. Let life do its bit in its own time.

It will not make life perfect. But it will make you steady when life is not.

What about you? If you had to write your life philosophy in one sentence, what would it be?

Get Lost to Get Found: The Art of Really Exploring a New City

What’s the best way to explore a new city?

Get Lost to Get Found: The Art of Really Exploring a New City

There is a particular thrill that comes with arriving somewhere for the first time. The streets don’t know your name, the map is still a puzzle, and every corner could hide your new favourite coffee shop. But in an age of five-star lists and must-see reels, it is remarkably easy to visit a city without ever actually exploring it.

The best way to explore a new city isn’t to tick off landmarks. It is to learn how it breathes. Here is how to do it properly.

1. Ditch the Itinerary for the First Morning

We all love a good plan, but give yourself half a day with no plan at all. Leave the hotel without a destination. Turn left because you like the sound of a bakery, not because Google Maps told you to.

Put on comfortable shoes, keep your phone in your pocket, and walk. Walk with curiosity, not purpose. Notice where locals queue for lunch, where children play after school, where the old men gather for a chat. A city’s true character is rarely on its high street; it is in the lanes that run parallel to it.

A gentle rule: If you get a little bit lost, you are doing it right.

2. Start with a Market, Not a Monument

If you want to understand a place, go where it shops and eats. Markets are the living room of any city.

Arrive early, buy something small – a piece of fruit, a local cheese, a cup of chai – and just watch. Ask the stallholder what they would recommend. That five-minute conversation will teach you more than any guidebook entry. You will learn what is in season, what people are celebrating, and how to say thank you in the local tongue.

3. Use Public Transport Like a Local

Taxis are comfortable, but buses and trams are classrooms. Hop on a bus with no real idea where it is going, sit near the front, and watch the city change through the window.

In London, it is the top deck of a double-decker. In Coimbatore, it might be a town bus to RS Puram. Pay attention to how people make space for each other, what music the driver is playing, and which stop suddenly empties half the bus. That is where something interesting is happening.

Buy a day ticket. It is the cheapest tour you will ever take.

4. Eat One Meal You Cannot Pronounce

It is tempting to search for “best restaurants near me”. Resist it for one meal.

Walk into a busy, unassuming place where the menu is handwritten and the staff are too busy to fuss over you. Order what the table next to you is having. If you are travelling solo, sit at the counter. Food is the fastest shortcut to trust, and in many cities, it is still an invitation to talk.

If you have dietary needs, learn to explain them in two or three words of the local language. People appreciate the effort enormously.

5. Find the High and the Low

Every city reveals itself from two perspectives: from above and from below ground level.

Find a high point – a church tower, a park on a hill, a rooftop café that does not charge an entry fee. Spend twenty minutes simply orienting yourself. Where is the river? Where does the old town end and the new begin?

Then go low. Find the old quarter, the riverside path, the canal walk, the steps that lead down to the water. That is where you will find the pace of the city before cars.

6. Talk to One Person Who Is Not Paid to Talk to You

Concierges, tour guides, and waiters are wonderful, but they are paid to be helpful. The magic happens when you chat with the bookseller, the tailor mending clothes on the pavement, the university student waiting for the same bus.

A simple opener works wonders: “I am visiting for the first time – what is one place here you love that visitors miss?” Most people light up. They are proud of their city, and they will send you somewhere no blog has ever listed.

7. Keep a Small Notebook, Not Just a Camera

Photographs are lovely, but they make us spectators. A notebook makes you a participant.

Jot down the name of the street with the jacaranda trees, the price of jasmine garlands, the funny sign outside the barber’s shop. Sketch the door knocker. Write down three smells and three sounds. When you get home, those scribbles will bring the city back more vividly than a hundred photos.

The best souvenir you can bring back from a new city is not a fridge magnet. It is a small habit – a way of greeting, a recipe, a morning walk – that you have borrowed and made your own.

So next time you arrive somewhere new, do not rush to conquer it. Let it unfold. Linger longer, plan less, and say yes to the inviting, slightly uncertain detour.

That is where the real city lives.

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Travel tip: If you are over 60 or travelling at a slower pace, split your exploration into two short walks – early morning and late afternoon – with a proper rest in between. Cities are kinder when you are not tired.

What’s a moment in your life that made you feel truly alive?

The Moment I Felt Most Alive

There are moments in life that do not announce their arrival.

No trumpet sounds. No clock stops. No one tells us that we are standing on the threshold of a memory we shall carry for the rest of our lives.

They simply happen.

And years later, when the world has changed, people have moved on, circumstances have altered and our own reflection in the mirror looks slightly unfamiliar, we remember that particular moment and think: Yes. That was life.

Not merely existence.

Life.

We often imagine feeling truly alive to be associated with extraordinary events—a wedding, the birth of a child, a promotion, an adventure, a journey to an unfamiliar country, perhaps even the achievement of a long-cherished dream.

But sometimes the most profound moments are deceptively ordinary.

A bicycle moving along a quiet road at dawn.

The first sip of tea on a winter morning.

A child’s laughter from another room.

A song from an old radio suddenly transporting us to a forgotten decade.

A hand resting gently in ours.

A classroom becoming silent because a child has finally understood something that seemed impossible a few minutes earlier.

Or perhaps sitting alone beneath an evening sky and realising that, despite everything, one is still here.

Still breathing.

Still capable of wonder.

When time briefly forgets to hurry

I remember that feeling of being completely absorbed in the present.

There was no yesterday demanding an explanation and no tomorrow asking for an answer. For a brief while, the relentless machinery of life seemed to pause.

I was not thinking about success or failure.

Not about money.

Not about age.

Not about what others thought of me.

I was simply there.

And strangely, that was enough.

Perhaps this is what being alive truly means—not possessing everything we desire, but being sufficiently present to recognise what we already possess.

We spend so much of our lives preparing for life that we sometimes forget to live it.

We work for a better tomorrow.

We save for a comfortable future.

We worry about examinations, careers, mortgages, responsibilities, reputations and retirement.

Then one day we look back and discover that the future we were preparing for has quietly become the past.

Life, meanwhile, was happening in the margins.

The small miracles

Perhaps our most alive moments are not spectacular because they do not need to be.

A mother watching her sleeping child.

Two old friends laughing about something that happened forty years ago.

A couple walking together without saying a word.

A teacher seeing confidence appear in the eyes of a hesitant student.

A writer discovering the right sentence after struggling with a page for an hour.

A traveller standing before a mountain and feeling suddenly insignificant—and strangely connected to everything.

These moments possess no measurable value.

They cannot be deposited in a bank.

They cannot be displayed in a trophy cabinet.

Yet they become our private wealth.

And unlike money, they often appreciate with age.

Perhaps being alive is a matter of attention

We are surrounded by wonders so familiar that we have stopped noticing them.

The morning sun does not demand applause.

Rain does not ask whether we have time to watch it.

Flowers bloom without consulting calendars.

Children grow while we are busy making plans for them.

Parents age while we are occupied with our own lives.

Friends disappear gradually into different cities, different responsibilities and different worlds.

And one day, we realise that what we considered ordinary was actually extraordinary.

The greatest tragedy may not be that life is short.

It may be that we are frequently absent while living it.

Our bodies are in the room, but our minds are elsewhere.

Our children are speaking, but we are checking our phones.

A friend is sharing a story, but we are composing our reply.

The sunset is unfolding, but we are rushing home to watch it on a screen.

Perhaps the secret is not to find more extraordinary moments.

Perhaps it is to become more attentive to the ordinary ones.

The moment that remains

If someone asked me today, “What was the one moment in your life that made you feel truly alive?”, I might struggle to give a single answer.

Because perhaps there was never just one.

There were dozens.

Maybe hundreds.

Scattered like little lamps along the road.

Some belonged to youth. Some to love. Some to teaching. Some to family. Some to solitude. Some arrived through music, books, travel or simple conversation.

And some came disguised as difficulties.

There were moments when life hurt deeply, yet something within me became strangely awake. Pain stripped away the unnecessary and revealed what mattered.

That, too, is being alive.

To laugh until your stomach hurts.

To cry because something mattered.

To love despite knowing love can wound.

To forgive when resentment would be easier.

To stand again after falling.

To look at an uncertain future and walk towards it anyway.

Perhaps feeling truly alive is not about happiness alone.

It is about feeling.

Feeling deeply enough that the world leaves a mark upon you.

And then there is now

Perhaps the most beautiful realisation is this:

The moment that makes us feel truly alive does not necessarily belong to the past.

It could be this moment.

This breath.

This page.

This quiet night.

This conversation.

This opportunity to begin again.

We keep searching for the grand moment when life will finally reveal its meaning.

But perhaps life has been whispering all along:

Look around.

You are already here.

And sometimes, that is the miracle.

So, what was your moment?

Was it standing beneath a particular sky?

Holding someone’s hand?

Hearing your child’s first cry?

Achieving something you once thought impossible?

Surviving something you thought would break you?

Or perhaps it was a completely ordinary morning when, for no particular reason, you suddenly felt grateful to be alive.

Whatever it was, hold it gently.

Memory is a strange kind of time machine. It cannot return us to the moment, but it can return the moment to us.

And perhaps that is why certain memories never grow old.

They continue to breathe inside us.

They remind us that, for at least one beautiful instant, we were not merely passing through life.

We were completely, gloriously, wonderfully alive.

Sometimes the heart keeps what time cannot save,
A smile, a touch, a moment brave.
Years may vanish, seasons depart,
But the moments we truly lived keep breathing in the heart.

The genie grants you a wish. What is it?

If the Genie Granted Me One Wish…

One ordinary morning, while the kettle is boiling and the world is busy pretending to have everything under control, a genie appears.

Not from a television commercial. Not from a WhatsApp forward. A real genie.

He adjusts his turban, clears his throat and says, rather grandly:

“You have one wish. Ask, and it shall be granted.”

For a moment, I would probably forget every sensible thing I have ever believed.

One wish!

Should I ask for wealth? Health? A house overlooking the sea? A never-ending supply of books? Perhaps a Royal Enfield that never needs servicing?

The possibilities are dangerous.

But after the excitement settles, I think I know what I would ask for.

I would ask for peace.

Not merely peace in the world, although that would certainly be welcome. I would ask for the quieter, rarer kind—the peace that resides within a human being.

The peace of not constantly comparing one’s life with another’s.

The peace of knowing that enough is enough.

The peace of forgiving those who hurt us and, perhaps more importantly, forgiving ourselves for the mistakes we cannot undo.

We spend an astonishing portion of our lives chasing things that promise happiness. We chase money, recognition, possessions, promotions, followers and approval. We renovate houses while neglecting the rooms within ourselves.

And then, one day, we discover that the treasure we were searching for was not buried somewhere outside us.

It was buried beneath our own restlessness.

If the genie offered me youth, I would hesitate. Youth is beautiful, but it comes with impatience. If he offered me immense wealth, I might ask whether it came with immense responsibility. If he offered me fame, I would probably remember that fame is a strange visitor—it arrives loudly and leaves without saying goodbye.

But peace?

Yes.

Give me enough peace to sit quietly without feeling guilty about doing nothing.

Give me enough wisdom to understand that not every argument deserves an answer.

Give me enough humility to say I was wrong.

Give me enough courage to say I love you while there is still time.

Give me enough gratitude to notice the small miracles that usually escape our attention—the morning light, a familiar voice, a child’s laughter, a cup of tea, an old song, a good book, a friend’s unexpected message.

And perhaps I would add one tiny clause to my wish.

Let the people I love have peace too.

Because happiness becomes strangely incomplete when it is enjoyed alone.

The genie might look at me suspiciously.

“That’s your one wish?”

“Yes.”

“No gold?”

“No.”

“No palace?”

“No.”

“No eternal youth?”

“Certainly not.”

He might shake his head. “You humans are becoming very philosophical.”

And I would smile.

“Perhaps we become philosophical only after discovering that everything else has an expiry date.”

The genie might then disappear in a puff of smoke, leaving behind neither diamonds nor treasure.

Only silence.

And perhaps that would be the real magic.

For the older I become, the more I suspect that a good life is not one in which we possess everything we once desired. It is one in which we no longer need everything we once desired.

Maybe the greatest wish is not:

“Give me more.”

Maybe it is:

“Teach me to need less, love more and live fully with what I already have.”

And if that sounds like a small wish, perhaps we have forgotten how much can fit inside something small.

Four lines to take home

If a genie grants one wish today,
Don’t ask for treasures that fade away.
Ask for a heart that can quietly see—
That enough, sometimes, is the richest of thee.

BOOK REVIEW: DEBTS OF SILENCEDEBTS OF SILENCEby Prashant Kumar Lal

BOOK REVIEW: DEBTS OF SILENCE

DEBTS OF SILENCE
by Prashant Kumar Lal

Available on All the Amazon Platforms Worldwide in Paperback and digital format

A literary crime novel — Mumbai · Dubai · London
A murder mystery, a love story, and a reckoning with inherited grief, told across three cities and fifteen years
There is a particular kind of crime novel that uses its plot as scaffolding for something considerably more personal, and Debts of Silence belongs unmistakably to that tradition. On its surface, this is the story of Divya Rao, a forensic accountant and former CBI officer, drawn into investigating the death of textile-and-fintech tycoon Rajan Malhotra the night before he was to announce a merger that would launder a network of stolen Indian antiquities through a Dubai free port and a London auction house. Underneath that surface, though, runs a quieter, more aching plot: a daughter’s fifteen-year search for the truth about her own father’s death, and her slow, reluctant discovery that the two cases were never separate at all.

Structure and Pacing

The novel is organised in three parts — Mumbai, Dubai, London — and this geographic architecture does real narrative work rather than functioning as mere travelogue. Part One (“The Study”) is the book’s strongest sustained stretch: patient, atmospheric, confident enough to let scenes breathe.

Lal lingers over small physical details — a whisky glass moved half an inch from where it started, the particular over-sweetness of incense laid on to cover something rather than honour it — and trusts the reader to understand that in a forensic mystery, the smallest material facts are the plot. The chapter in which Divya first examines Rajan Malhotra’s study is a genuine set piece, doing the work of establishing both procedure and grief in the same unhurried paragraphs.
Part Two (“The Free Zone”) shifts registers effectively, trading Mumbai’s humid, incense-thick interiors for Dubai’s glass-and-desert glare, and it’s here that the novel’s romantic plot — between Divya and Arjun Malhotra, the murdered man’s estranged nephew and unlikely heir — takes on real weight rather than functioning as a subplot bolted onto the mystery. The rooftop scene in particular earns its emotional turn; it’s preceded by enough genuine conversation, enough shared risk, that the shift from professional alliance to something more feels inevitable rather than contractual.
Part Three (“The Saleroom”) carries the heaviest narrative burden — the reveal of the true architect behind fifteen years of buried deaths, an Interpol notice engineered to remove Arjun from the board before the climax, a public reckoning on an auction floor — and largely succeeds, though it is worth noting for prospective readers that the emotional and sensory density Lal establishes so carefully in Parts One and Two occasionally outpaces the final movement’s ability to match it scene for scene.

The revelation that the “man who was never in the room” is Vinod Ranade — the family’s own trusted lawyer, present at every crisis by invitation and therefore never once suspected — is a genuinely well-seeded twist; the clue, planted in Divya’s father’s audit (“find who is never in the room, and you will find who I am truly afraid of”), rewards attentive readers without feeling like a cheat. What works less cleanly is the compression of consequence: Kapadia’s plea, Al-Fahim’s cooperation agreement, Rathod’s disappearance, and Meera’s quiet reinvention all arrive in a relatively tight sequence, and a reader who has spent three hundred-odd pages with these characters may reasonably want more room to sit with each reckoning individually rather than receiving them in summary.

Character and Voice

Divya Rao is the novel’s clear achievement. Lal resists the temptation to make her either invulnerable or decorative; her competence is real and hard-won, but so is her fear, and the novel is at its best when it lets her be frightened without becoming fragile — the scooter brake-line sequence and the sealed-container chapters both understand that suspense works better through a protagonist’s disciplined management of terror than through its absence. Arjun is a more conventional romantic figure — the prodigal heir, the man running from a family he loves and distrusts in equal measure — but his professional identity as an art restorer is put to real use rather than treated as colour; his ability to read a bronze’s repair scar or a crate’s strapping tension becomes, cleverly, a detective skill in its own right.

The supporting cast is where the novel’s moral seriousness shows most clearly. Nilofer Khan, the longtime executive assistant who has kept the family’s secrets for twenty-six years, is given genuine interiority rather than serving as a mere plot device for exposition — her late confession that she mistook a powerful man’s trust for her own virtue is one of the book’s sharper psychological observations, and one that gives the novel’s title its real charge: hers is a debt paid out in decades of silence, not currency.

Kapadia is drawn with real sympathy as a coward rather than a villain, which is a harder and more interesting choice than the alternative.

Prose and Theme

Lal’s prose favours long, accumulating sentences — clauses stacked on clauses, arriving at their point only after several qualifying turns — which suits a novel about the slow excavation of buried truth, though it occasionally risks over-explaining an emotion the scene has already earned through action or dialogue. The novel’s recurring image — ash, incense, the residue left behind once something has been burned away or covered over — is deployed with genuine discipline; it never curdles into overreach. And the title itself is honestly earned rather than merely decorative: nearly every character in this novel is, in some fashion, paying down a debt incurred by years of silence — Nilofer’s, Kapadia’s, Ranade’s most of all, and even Divya’s own fifteen-year silence about her father’s death, which she finally, at real cost, breaks.

Thematically, the novel’s real subject is complicity — the thousand small, individually defensible compromises (a coroner reconsidering his notes, a lawyer redrafting a will, an analyst deciding to wait until morning) that collectively build the machinery capable of burying a murder for fifteen years. This is a more interesting argument than most commercial thrillers attempt, and Lal is at his best when he lets the novel sit with it rather than resolving it too neatly.

Verdict

Debts of Silence is a confident, atmospheric debut into literary crime fiction — strongest in its opening movement, warmest in its handling of Divya and Arjun’s relationship, and most ambitious in its refusal to let its villain be a simple monster rather than a man built slowly, over thirty years, out of small surrenders. Readers who enjoy a mystery that takes its time, trusts its setting, and cares as much about grief as about plot mechanics will find a great deal to admire here.

“A mystery that takes its time, trusts its setting, and cares as much about grief as about plot mechanics.”

Who Should Read This Book

Debts of Silence is best suited to readers who enjoy literary crime fiction that favours atmosphere and moral complexity over pure procedural pace — readers of authors such as Vikram Chandra, Kate Morton, or Abir Mukherjee will find familiar pleasures here. More specifically, the novel should appeal to:

• Fans of slow-burn detective fiction who prefer a mystery built on patient observation and character study rather than rapid-fire action.
• Readers drawn to international, multi-city thrillers that use setting — Mumbai’s old wealth, Dubai’s free-zone commerce, London’s auction world — as more than backdrop.
• Readers of family-saga fiction who enjoy inheritance plots, generational secrets, and the slow unravelling of a trusted household.
• Romance-adjacent crime readers who want a genuine, earned relationship arc alongside the investigation rather than a perfunctory subplot.
• Anyone interested in the antiquities trade, cultural repatriation, or the ethics of the art market, which the novel treats with real seriousness rather than as exotic colour.
• Readers who appreciated the moral ambiguity of a novel like A Suitable Boy or the quiet menace of a Ruth Rendell mystery will find a kindred sensibility in Lal’s handling of complicity and cowardice.
  
• Content note: the novel includes scenes of violence, one sustained sequence of peril, and tasteful but clearly adult romantic content; it is intended for adult readers rather than a young-adult audience.
  
• About the Author
  Prashant Kumar Lal is an educator, writer and former school principal whose professional life has been shaped by a sustained interest in human behaviour, institutions and the often-unspoken forces that influence the choices people make.
  
• With several decades devoted to education and school leadership, he has worked extensively with students, teachers, parents and educational institutions, moving beyond the classroom into academic administration, teacher development, assessment and educational consultancy. Alongside this professional journey, writing has remained a quieter and more personal pursuit — a way of examining memory, relationships, values, human frailty, and the questions that persist beneath ordinary life.
  As an author, Lal has written across several genres, including reflective prose, educational literature, childhood memoir and fiction, marked throughout by an interest in the intersection of the visible and the concealed — what people say, what they withhold, and what eventually reveals itself despite their efforts to keep it hidden.
  
• Debts of Silence marks his deliberate movement into literary crime fiction. Set across Mumbai, Dubai and London, the novel brings together forensic accountancy, financial concealment, antiquities trafficking, family inheritance and an unresolved death. At its centre is Divya Rao, a forensic accountant whose professional instinct for discrepancies gradually becomes a deeply personal search for truth.
  For Lal, the investigation is not merely a pursuit of a murderer. It is an examination of how wrongdoing survives through systems — through transactions, omissions, compromised loyalties and convenient silences. Prashant Kumar Lal continues to write with the conviction that a story should entertain the reader, but should also leave behind a question worth carrying beyond the final page.

Genre: Literary Crime Fiction / Mystery-Thriller
Setting: Mumbai · Dubai · London
Recommended for: Adult readers of literary and international crime fiction
Reviewed for general readership and trade consideration