A man wakes up one day with a missing arm. He sets out on a journey to find it, following signs, tracing through the underbelly of the overpopulated Mumbai. Along the way he meets strange characters like a woman selling rainbows, a coffin-maker who builds finger-sized caskets, chickens that practise black magic and a giant who lives underwater.

They offer him clues for a price that eventually lead him to Baba Rakhu who will reveal the story of his lost arm. It’s all as absurd as it can get, so much so that at some point the nameless narrator even applies for a job as a suicide bomber. One wonders if his search is really for his arm or there’s something larger at play: "of going without, of finding an identity even as parts of it have been sliced clean away from his body".

Anosh Irani's The Cripple and His Talismans won critical acclaim for its magic realism and has been compared to the works of Samuel Beckett, Lewis Carroll, and Salman Rushdie. "His version of Bombay as surreal and stark and serendipitous was not exactly the Mumbai I used to visit on summer vacations, but it was less bombastically prescriptive than the Outsider tour guides written in books like Shantaram and Maximum City", says Deepa Dharmadhikari in Mint.

"Read it for the audacity of a wordsmith who sets out to write a prose poem of the fantastic, mythic, horrible and hilarious memories he has of a city he once knew."

Published in 2014.

Isn’t loitering or simply "hanging out" a fundamental human act? Since when did it become a male prerogative? Why do women need to demonstrate a purpose each time they step out? And if they don’t, why are they called frivolous?

Is safety the real reason for controlling a woman’s movement or is it her reputation or her family’s honour? Is the focus on crime rather than fighting for access to public space forcing women towards more dependencies? Do women of a certain socio-economic class, age or orientation enjoy more freedom or, no matter who they are, their choice to move around as they please is always conditional?

Have women become so accustomed to justifying it that they don’t even realise that their natural pleasure to loiter is obstructed?

Mumbai is the best place for women to live is a common perception. It is a benchmark for almost all women across India to live life like a Bombay girl. However, according to the authors Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade, "if this is the standard of access to public space in the country, then perhaps we lack both ambition and imagination".

The questions above and many more complex arguments are a result of their three years of research that will both enlighten and enrage the reader (who doesn’t need to be a feminist, or even a woman).

Published in 2011.

Sold by her father to the local police station at the age of nine to be repeatedly raped, Leela’s abuse and her entry into the sex trade is quite typical. But that’s not how we see her.

Leela, the "bootyful" heroine of Beautiful Thing, doesn’t come across as exploited and beaten into a life she abhors. She is "foul-mouthed", a "genius of vulgarity", "quirky", "alive" and full of "grit" and "chutzpah". She enjoys what she does; she loves to be pleasured.

Being the highest paid bar dancer at Night Lovers, she is wealthy and believes, as Basharat Peer writes in his review, that "her job is to fool every man and extract what she can from them before surrendering her only asset – her body." She is only 19 when Faleiro befriends her and presents her to us in a series of rich, unguarded moments.

But Leela's life, along with the lives of thousands like her, altered beyond recognition when an ambitious politician imposed a ban on dance bars in August 2005 to uphold the "murky, middle class morality" that continues to pervade the Indian society. The sex, which was a choice and not the primary occupation of these dancers, then became a compulsion and pushed them into unemployment and prostitution.

This literary reportage won great acclaim and was named a Time Out Subcontinental Book of the Year and an Observer Book of the Year. It leaves the reader with unresolved issues and a lump in the throat for Leela.

Published in 2012.

"Arzee is a welcome change in a literature that has, for the most part, been susceptible to reflecting the narrow, English-speaking world of its writers and many of its readers," says Samhita Arni in The Caravan.

Standing three and a half feet above the ground, Arzee has a complicated life. If he doesn’t look up when he talks to people, he ends up staring at their crotches. He is ridiculed, assaulted, and made to feel "small" in a rough and unforgiving society.

To be able to "rise" in the world, he wants a better job, more money, a wife, and make his mother happy. So when the old projectionist at Noor cinema retires, Arzee is happy. He assures himself that he will be made the head now. In his mind all the problems have been solved. But the cinema owners decide to shut the theatre and his dreams of a bright future are shattered. And above all this, there are old debts to be paid and Monique, his girlfriend, has left him without telling him.

Arzee faces more self-humiliation in days to come and begins to wonder who he is and what his life is all about. A twist of plot towards the end leads him ‘to fight for his new love, free himself from his mother’s shadow, and push on towards self-reliance" in the world of the fives and the sixes.

Chandrahas Choudhury’s debut novel has been selected by World Literature Today as one of 60 essential works of modern Indian literature in English.

Published in 2009.