About the Book

He was a banker in mourning. She was a stranger who refused to say sorry.

February 2013, Varanasi. Ananth Krishnan has come to the Ganga to complete his father’s barsi. Gurpreet Kaur Dhillon, a hotel duty manager, takes one look at his grief and offers him tea instead of condolences. At checkout, she writes her number on his receipt. Weeks later, he confesses what she half suspected: he is married.

She never asks him to leave. He never promises to. So they make rules. One protected hour every Friday. No Friday ends in silence.

For twelve years, across Varanasi, Mumbai and Chennai, they love without a name, a witness or a future, and call it honesty. Then a wife demands a choice, a road near Pondicherry takes the rest, and Ananth is left to mourn a woman the world never knew he had.

Some love stories end at the altar. This one began at the river, and it refuses to let go.

About the Author

Ravindra (Ravi) Rao spent three decades in the financial services industry before turning to fiction writing, an apprenticeship he now describes as “excellent training for writing about people who say one thing indoors and mean an entirely different thing while driving home”.

Twelve Monsoons is his fourth novel. He has previously written and published Silk & Shadows, Dirty Float and Kintsugi.

He is drawn, in his own reading and now in his own work, to stories that resist the tidy arithmetic of blame – to marriages that are not failures so much as unfinished arguments, and to love that survives without ever being once granted a wedding, a ritual or a witness.

Ask him why Twelve Monsoons spans exactly twelve years, and he’ll tell you, only half-jokingly, that a monsoon is the one season India insists on repeating faithfully whether or not anyone is ready for it – “which felt, to me, like the truest thing I would say about love as well.”

He lives in Mumbai and is currently on a writing spree that he calls his latest nasha, which took over from filter coffee.