Desert shadows - P Sachidanandan

A powerful story about one man's refusal to give in to the barrenness of modern life Kundan is a labour officer at a sensitive defence project in a remote desert town. A section of the workers at the construction site are prisoners drawn from different jails. While recruiting them, Kundan detects an innocent villager who has taken on the identity and sentence of a ruthless killer and joined the project in his place. This becomes the starting point of a series of revelations, and Kundan slowly begins to discover the frightening truth about the actual nature of the project. As events unfold in the town, he gets further enmeshed in the webs woven by the State to keep its citizens in its grasp. Juxtaposing the bloody history of the town with the pathetic stories of the prisoners and the inhabitants of the surrounding drought-stricken villages, the novel paints a picture of the hopelessness of human life. through the ages.;Set against the brooding presence of a Rajput fort and a desert which is gradually making its way into the town, it reveals that the cruelties of the present are no different from the violence of the past, that the categories which separate the prisoner from the jailer, the hunter from the hunted, can easily collapse. Writing with gut-wrenching honesty about the terror and the pain which haunts the citizens of modern society, the author has produced a stark and disturbing novel about the nature of human existence.