Wielding forthright prose and a thriller’s pace, Dipika Mukherjee weaves the personal life of an American professor into the political life of a nation on the verge of crisis.
Nota Benes, January 2017, World Literature Today
In Mukherjee’s contemporary political novel…Jay and Agni, the “broken things,” approach healing through their buried history “until the river floods and the silt uncovers what should remain hidden.
Publishers Weekly Book Review
With astonishing honesty, Dipika Mukherjee’s Thunder Demonsexposes modern Malaysia’s ugliest secrets in a page-turner of a tale about loyalty, love, family, memory, and the role of politics in the lives of ordinary human beings. This book will open the eyes of non-Malaysians and break the hearts of Malaysians by forcing us to confront what our country has become.
PreetaSamarasan, author ofEvening is the Whole day
With a strong cast of characters, Thunder Demons unveils Malaysia as it grapples with tradition in the face of globalization, especially over the issue of who is abumiputra. Combining themes of communal violence, religion and identity, this is a racy and dramatic story of love and betrayal
Kishwar Desai, author of Witness by Night
Longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize/ Longlisted for the The Economist Crossword Award
Set against the backdrop of conflicting cultures, political turbulence, and a deep sense of belonging to the contradictions that form Malaysia, Agni is struggling to comprehend her relationship with the land she calls home. Abhik – her childhood friend and new lover, is supportive of her quest to unbolt dark secrets from her past about her mother’s death, but the only man who can answer her questions is Jay Ghosh – for he still wears her mother’s demon’s teeth around his neck. Jay had been there with Shanti the evening she died. When Jay lands in Malaysia after thirty years – summoned by Colonel S, his mentor and father figure – Jay realises, as does Agni, that nothing is as it seems. Each must fight larger demons, for there are greater things at stake.
(2016) Ode to Broken Things, London: Repeater Books.
Launched in the UK in May 2016 and distributed by Penguin/Random House in the US.(Republication of Thunder Demons)
NewCity Lit: Decades of Living Dangerously
Article in Our FrontCover: The Irrepressible Dipika Mukherjee
Thunder Demons in Huffington Post Article on 50 Women Writing on Conflict, August 2014
Prologue
When his cellphone rang at two in the morning, Colonel S picked it up and, still blurry from sleep, thought, Stupid bitch, she’s finally done it. The person at the other end of the line spoke slowly. When he had understood what he was being told, he swung his legs over the side of the bed, rushed out, and got into the car, heading for the abandoned construction site in Shah Alam. A band of fear briefly tightened around his heart as he saw the figures in the darkness. This was it then! But the figures seemed diminished by the tall lalang grass waving in the slight breeze, and he could feel the moist night, satiny with humidity, cloaking him in its susurrations. The clouds had erased the moon.
He could see the princeling, an important senior minister in the Malaysian cabinet, flanked by a junior minister. The princeling was tall, but looked even more stooped in the moonlight as he struggled to light his cigarette. His wife stood ramrod straight next to him, her hennaed red hair a blurry fuzz under the scarf covering her head.
Colonel S allowed himself a smile. So this was going to be a circus, with a prime-time audience. The princeling may have political clout in Malaysia — the royal blood flowing in his wife’s veins didn’t hurt — but he could be so easily manipulated by friends like the young minister who was now standing by his side.
The two bodyguards flanking the princeling swivelled their heads simultaneously; there was the sound of a car approaching. As the princeling’s nervous fingers dropped the lit cigarette, the young minister ground it into the wet soil deliberately, both of them turning away from the headlights. The princeling’s wife drew her scarf tightly around her face. The red Proton Saga slowed to a bumpy stop, killing the headlights, and the tyres squelched into the mud.
A woman opened the back door as the princeling’s bodyguards stood guard. There was a slight scuffle, then another woman was dragged out from the back seat. She was blindfolded, and Colonel S could see the blood glistening on her forehead even in the dim light. The woman whimpered softly, a plaintive cry in the silence of that deserted stretch of land. Colonel S felt the humidity soak into his shirt as they all stood waiting in the moist stillness.
Then the princeling tilted his head in a nod. It was as if the noise of the tropical night started as a simmer of twitters and chirps and flutters and squeaks, breaking the spell. Colonel S jerked his head towards the pole. The two bodyguards dragged the woman (she struggled against the soft ground which refused to yield to her splayed toes)leaving an anguished trail. Her blindfold slipped off, and the wispy black material crouched into the ground like wounded batwings in the night.
