The Girl in Room 105
Meet Keshav. His job is a dead end, the woman he loved has long since moved on, and he's spent four years at the bottom of a bottle trying to convince himself he's fine. He hasn't managed it yet. Zara was his everything, a Kashmiri Muslim girl whose relationship with the decidedly traditional Keshav was always going to be complicated. They parted ways. She rebuilt her life. He didn't so much rebuild as quietly collapse, filling his evenings with unanswered calls and furtive scrolling through her social media. Then, on the night before her birthday, something unexpected happens. Zara reaches out. She asks him to come to her hostel room, number 105, just like old times. He knows he shouldn't go. He goes anyway. What follows changes everything. Bhagat is upfront about what this story is and isn't. It's not a romance. It's the opposite, an un-love story, one that examines what happens when affection curdles into fixation and a person loses sight of who they are. Set against the texture of contemporary India, the novel moves at a sharp pace, mixing moments of genuine humour with a thriller plot that keeps the pages turning. Fans of Five Point Someone and 2 States will find familiar warmth in Bhagat's accessible writing, though the subject matter here carries a darker, more urgent edge.
- Author: Chetan Bhagat
- Publisher: HarperCollins India
- Genre: Contemporary Fiction
- ISBN: 978-9356290969
- Pages: 356 pages