Friendship between two teenaged boys dissolves in the aftermath of an act of violence typical of the place they live in - the north Indian town of Muzaffarnagar. A young man comes to the same town to celebrate Diwali with his family and learns that, given his roots, his cosmopolitanism might not be an option anymore. A young woman, hitherto unburdened with family duties, grapples with the absence of grief upon her father's death. Elsewhere, a recently married couple is pulled apart by a crisis rooted in the woman's traumatic childhood. In Tanuj Solanki's Diwali in Muzaffarnagar, young men and women travel between the past and the present, the metropolis and the small town, and the always-at-odds needs of life: solitude and family.

He is a bruised man, adrift, keening for a lost love. His sorrow submerges everything: his agony is truest, his epiphanies greatest. Do you despise him? You're too late. He despises himself already. This is his story: Anne-Marie, his true love, has left him and their Mumbai flat. There is a girl who pretends to be a lesbian with whom he has an awkward encounter of the almost-coital kind. And then, when he goes to Pattaya looking for sex (when he could have gone to Interlaken looking for love), he finds Noon, just the sort of woman who might mend - and break again - his wounded heart; and he finds Orhan, who may or may not be the son he never had. Here is a debut at once pensive and feral, cutting down to our most private tragedies - and to that shameful inference we must all some day come to: we are neither heroes nor insects.