A book is almost always like a movie. It plays in your head as you lap up the sentences and images. This is what Ashish Vikram’s The House with the Green Roof attempts to do. Veenu, a young college graduate, lands a job in a start-up in Bengaluru. But he finds that the company has closed down. His stay at the house with the green roof (italicised throughout the book, as if to constantly enunciate why the book was named that) has been paid for, so he decides to stay back and look for another job. Vini, another employee of the same company, is also at the guest house. Just as they get to know each other, a murder takes place.
Parallel stories are always fascinating, especially since the reader constantly wonders what the common point will be.
It Happened Like This is a story of three women — an Irish nun who runs a school in Ooty, a Parsi widow who moves there to manage an estate property and falls in love with an army man, and a woman at the crossroads of her marriage — brought together by fate. Set against the backdrop of a newborn country, the book explores the changes that a new system brings to the families of that country.
