Terrible Loves

About This Book

A haunting collection of sixteen stories exploring love, loss, and longing across contemporary India and beyond. From a woman crafting elaborate relationships with imaginary lovers to a fading artist consumed by light, from detention camps to ancient temples where devotion transcends boundaries—these tales weave together the beautiful and brutal realities of human connection. Drawing from characters she has encountered as a portraitist of the mundane over two decades in Indian media, Tara Das illuminates the spaces between desire and fulfilment, tradition and progress, belonging and exile. In "Broken Mirror," Una searches for authentic connection while performing romance. In "Light of A Life" a fading artist is consumed by the light. "City Whisperer" follows Venkat as he replants his hometown into the city he's migrated to. "Retrograde" sees Chitra's life ruled by the stars. "Johnny Boy" is about a girl and her trusty steed. "Mr Lova Lova" is confronted by women with needs and sexual power of their own. "Flame of the Forest" a blind boy sees what his fellow men can't. "The Civilised" follows Kaataraja as he amasses a collection of shoes. "Adakkam" is the tension between one woman who won't compromise and her partner, who did. "Motherland" follows a doctor's return from Canada to find his aging mother erased by bureaucracy. "The Legend of Soorthani" reimagines historical conquest through forbidden love. "Is Happily Ever After" the story of true love? "Irrelevance" chronicles a pandemic's forgotten victims through an obituary writer's eyes. "What the Buddha said" is about a lifelong devotion to Nothing. "There Will Come Soft Rains" is our collective devotion to the past. "All There is Left to Say" is devoted to the love of not seeing reality.  Set against backdrops from bustling newsrooms to remote villages, ancient kingdoms to post-apocalyptic futures, these stories examine how we love, lose, and endure. Das writes with unflinching honesty about domestic violence, displacement, and inequality, yet finds transcendent beauty in unexpected places. Terrible Loves reveals the terrible beauty of human connection—how we wound each other in love's name, persist despite betrayal, and continue reaching toward one another across vast distances.