Climbing Shoes

Twenty-four years after her sexy debut novella, Paro: Dreams of Passion, Namita Gokhale writes a sequel featuring Paro’s beloved friend, Priya, now married to a powerful minister. Unlike Paro, who dreamt of passion, Priya is all about power. In the form of entries in a journal, it’s meant to be a voyeuristic peep into the internal workings of a woman on the fringes of Delhi’s power coteries. Which is a great idea.

But it slips in and out of this mode. Sometimes it reads like a novel with very short chapterlets, but at other times you keep wondering what happened next as the journal turns a page and goes into the next episode.