Sachin Kundalkar’s Silk Route isn’t in a hurry to explain itself. It starts slow, quiet and stays that way for most of its length. I drifted through Nishikant’s life like someone flipping through an old diary… not always in order, not always complete. It doesn’t spell out emotions or tie up every thread. The way I see it is that it is more dissecting memories and moods, and the pauses between people. There’s loss here and there. There’s love here and there but it may make you feel like nothing much is in the centre. What we get is a character who often doesn’t know what to do with his own past and a novel that’s okay with that uncertainty.
Nishikant’s world is small at first. He spends his days walking around Pune with his sister Nalini, keeping mostly to his thoughts and dreams. There’s a quietness to him, a sort of emotional fog he walks through… Even when he’s imagining love, it feels unreal. But things change fast. A love affair and a tragedy later, he’s shipped off to Mumbai by parents who are indifferent to his grief. There is no dramatization. It just happens… suddenly, just like most real-life traumas.
In Mumbai, and later in London, Nishikant starts to open up, not fully, but enough. Through Shiv and then Sreenivas, we see him try to build something of his own: identity, intimacy, while the past is still the main ingredient. It’s slow, and sometimes unclear what he’s actually chasing, but the novel seems less concerned with big revelations and more with the in-between… the people who come and go, the letters that arrive, the feelings that linger without direction.
By the time we meet Sreenivas, Nishikant has already gone through enough false starts to stop expecting permanence. But their bond is slower, steadier, built on long conversations and even longer silences. Most of it plays out through letters, which give the story some of its most affecting moments. So when Sreenivas suddenly vanishes, it’s not just a plot twist… It feels like the air is being sucked out of Nishikant’s world.
From there, the story becomes directionless. There’s tension, but it’s quiet. Even the strange figures Nishikant meets along the way Jules, Sophia – are more like fragments than fully drawn characters. You’re not sure what they mean, or why they matter, but maybe that’s the point. People don’t always arrive with purpose. Sometimes they’re just passing through.
Silk Route isn’t the kind of novel that wraps itself up neatly. The ending, if you can call it that, is more like a sudden stop than a final destination. Some threads hang loose, some questions go unanswered, and not every character gets the attention they might deserve. Nishikant’s grief over Nalini, for instance, is touched upon but never really explored with the weight it calls for. And yes, there are moments when the prose reaches for intensity but lands on confusion instead.
The blues in Silk Route are nostalgic and maybe just a slightly different shade of Cobalt Blue. The echoes are there. A sensitive male protagonist, a complex sibling bond, a queer desire unfolding in secret and silence.
Silk Route doesn’t try to impress. It just exists. Full of ache, stillness, and moments that catch you off guard. Maybe it’s the way the book refuses to tidy up the messiness of human feeling. Maybe it’s how it lets sadness linger without rushing to fix it.
