Lost and Found

CP Surendran

Harpercollins India,

224 pages, ` 250

Young and attractive Lakshmi kidnaps Placid Hari, a journalist, mistaking him to be the man who raped her 16 years ago. The morning after alters the course of events: Lakshmi and Hari find themselves taken hostage in a terrorist siege of Bombay along with a teenage fledgling actor. The jihadi-in-charge is the boy-soldier Salim, trained in Pakistan by Abul Razak, the object of whose hallucinogenic passion is Salim’s mother.