Pearls on Marble is out

The smell of perungayam, the consistency of sambar, the look of sugar syrup as it reaches one string, the precision in proportion for that proper sand-like texture of rava upma. I learned it watching amma cook. There were no formal lessons. They happened over irritated yelling, reluctant participation and eventually, having to feed myself. For years, these snuck into my essays and my other fictional work.

This summer marks over three years of compulsive drama watching, Urdu, Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese and Thai. I am drawn to slow-burn, deep yearning and closed-door romances.

I have carried these characters for a long time. I knew them. I knew the setting. I knew I wanted a female protagonist with agency. I wanted a redemption arc. I wanted a loud Tamil wedding. Most of all, I wanted the elements of the soap operas I grew up on. Family secrets, fated connections, multiple storylines and of course, food.

So, a novel was born. My third, and the first I have set fully in Kovai.

Pearls on Marble is out this week in paperback, hardcover, and on Kindle. Mithra Govindan runs her family’s catering business out of a kitchen held together by borrowed burners and sheer competence. Siddharth Rajan owns one of the grandest hotels in the city and is used to money settling every argument. Then a wedding goes wrong. Guests fall ill, a video of Mithra on her knees gathering her dead mother’s pearls off his marble floor goes viral, and the business her father built begins to come apart. The evidence will clear her. The rest is harder.

It is a slow-burn romance. Closed door, for those of you who will ask. It has a happily ever after and I am not one bit sorry about that! It also carries grief, money trouble, and an abusive marriage, so I am telling you now, up front.

What I wanted was a love story where the hero has to learn that loving a woman does not give him authority over her. Where “let me help” is the start of the argument and not the end of it. Where the ex-fiancée you expect to be a rival, and the sister who has her own marriage to survive, choose to stand by Mithra, and she by them. And I wanted the kitchen to be the point of the book and not the backdrop… The Mysore paak has to come out porous for it to go in the return bags. The salt goes top left on the banana leaf.

Kovai is on every page. Marudhamalai before dawn. The old mills turned into banquet halls with chandeliers hanging where the pulleys were. The distance, which is not measured in kilometres, between Oppanakara Street and Race Course Road. Filter kaapi in a steel tumbler at four in the morning with the burners already roaring. The kitchens in this book are invented. The rhythms are not.

Here is how to get it.

• A signed paperback from me, $20, shipped within the US: order here.
• Paperback, hardcover, or Kindle on Amazon.
• In India, the Kindle edition is on Amazon.in now, and free on Kindle Unlimited. The paperback for India is coming from Notion Press. I will post the day it goes live.

If you read it, tell me which chapter made you get up and make kaapi. And if you leave two lines on Amazon or Goodreads, that is what carries a book like this one to the readers I cannot reach on my own. The book page has the details.

Mithra would say: eat first. Then we talk.

If this moved you, send a tip.