Blood Red Sari by Ashok Banker

10 years ago Shaili Desai 1

(Update: Giveaway of this book is currently being hosted on this website. Do check it out here.)

iam redit et

(Translation: Now returns Justice)

-Virgil

This is how the book Blood Red Sari by Ashok Banker starts, being the first in the Kali Rising series. What follows is a power packed story of tremendously courageous women who fight to save themselves from an unknown villain.

Book Cover
Book Cover

I read many good reviews of the book and I couldn’t believe my luck when Amazon India had a free e-book download offer soon after. So, download, I did! And after that I had to finish it as soon as I could!

To give a brief introduction about the book, it’s a story of four women (technically, three since I am assuming the fourth one will come into the picture in the book next in the series) whose lives change when they receive a mysterious parcel containing documents that they can’t make head or tail of, at first. Their lives change when they are pursued because of the documents that threaten to damn a powerful business entity involved in trafficking of humans through NGOs.

Some good quotes from the book:

“…because you didn’t simply replace one social system or religion with another, you just layered it on top of the old one, layer after layer after layer, until bits and parts of the older layers peeked out through the new and it all made up the whole.”

“Come on, bitch. Man up,’ she said, then snorted a burst of laughter, spraying mucus from her running nose. Her eyes and nose and throat were all running because of the pain and because she was literally weeping with the pain. She had laughed because of the incongruity of her being a woman telling herself to ‘man’ up. ‘Woman up, bitch,’ she corrected herself. That sounded better. Toughness wasn’t an exclusive male privilege.

 If women can have babies without epidurals, I can fucking walk on a broken foot.”

On the whole, I really liked this book. I am looking forward to reading more books in the series. This also encourages me to check out more books by Ashok Banker. For a change, it’s a book by an Indian author which is not about women having stereotypical roles or professions.