Bombay Rains, Bombay Girls

Book excerpt: When Adi - a small-town eighteen-year-old with a giant inferiority complex- lands a chance to study medicine in big, bad Bombay, he is overjoyed. Although plagued by the thought that his success is a fluke and hence ill gotten, he plunges headlong into the sights and sounds of this dazzling city. Adi's initiation into college life isn't the most promising - a night of ragging by a bunch of sniggering seniors brings him and his equally vulnerable batchmates close to tears. But gradually, he finds his feet in the new world and makes friends with a motley crew: Pheru, Harsha, Rajeev, Toshi. It isn't long before they, and the rest of his class-much to his surprise, start looking up to him as a natural born leader. Somewhere along the way to accepting the challenge of this new role and learning the mysteries of the human anatomy, he also has his heart broken and falls in love - in that order. Then, just when life is beginning to look good, tragedy strikes, and Adi gets caught in an emotional vortex he must struggle to make sense of. Are principles more important than friendship? Does a student of medicine have the luxury of fighting personal battles while patients' lives are at stake? Adi knows that it is only when he resolves these questions for himself that he will be able to hold on to all the things close to his heart.