It’s raining in Shillong. Firdaus Ansari, an unhappy, middle-aged college lecturer, is walking on a mushy street. Sophie Das, an adopted, eight-year-old misfit, is standing against a wet window pane staring past her own reflection. And somewhere, even though we don’t read it in the opening chapter of Lunatic In My Head, we hear Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon wafting in and out of IAS aspirant Aman Moondy’s world.

The three of them want to break out of their destinies and escape from the place they are born in, but they end up doing all the things that tie them further to it. “Things move slowly. Grand ambitions inevitably seem comic. People can be hugely lazy. I can’t remember what I did with my youth except wait for something to happen, write bad poetry and laugh,” Hasan reminisces about her life in Shillong where she lived until she was 26.

Firdaus, Aman and Sophie are also Dkhars or non-Khasi: a word that that the Khasis use to describe outsiders. “Several instances in the book are evocative of this discrimination,” points out Arunima Mazundar in the Times of India. “Sophie is scoffed at by Khasi girls of her age because the waitress refuses to serve her tea and snacks at the wedding. Aman, consciously aware of his outsider status, remains silent when the bully Max abuses the boiled-potato seller. And Firdaus feels no less than an alien when Ibomcha, her boyfriend, talks about taking her to Manipur to meet his mother.”

Yet they love Shillong. And nothing really happens as we reach the end. There is no war, not even great revelations. The book does not set out to explore and expose political struggles of the North-East. Instead, it subtly deals with the sensitive space that exists between the insiders and the outsiders, their desire to belong to the other, and the agony of not being able to do so.

Published in 2012.