The Tiger's Share by Keshava Guha | Published by Hachette India

 

Title – The Tiger’s Share
Author – Keshava Guha
Genre – Contemporary Literature
Publisher – Hachette India (2025)
ISBN – 978-1399813389
Hardback – 246 pages
Buy – Amazon  

“Well, let me tell you. We - we humans - have decided that we are apart from life. Above life. Nature, after all, has rules that we don't set. It has limits. It has its own law of Karma. Everything you do has its consequence, has its response. We used to know all this. We have forgotten.”

The Tiger’s Share is a quiet storm of a novel. The multilayered story is set in present-day Delhi. A family's private conflicts become a lens through which we observe social and political shifts in India. 

The book opens with a jarring scene: a father resigns. Brahm Saxena, a retired accountant, calls a family meeting. He tells his children—Tara, a brilliant lawyer, and Rohit, a drifting son—that he is done. Done being a father. He wants to serve something larger now. The planet. The country. Maybe even the truth.

His personal choice ripples outward. It begins to mirror the novel’s core themes—ecological, political, and generational. One strange declaration turns into a story about the cost of ideals. 

This is the central storyline of The Tiger’s Share. We witness it all through Tara’s perspective. She sees the city clearly. Smog in the sky. Garbage on the streets. Thick air and how sweetness of a city gone bad. Tara narrates it all with a sharp eye. She is ambitious and restless. She wants to believe in something. But doubt creeps in. Maybe she isn’t who her father hoped she’d be.

There is another pair of siblings: Kunal and Lila. Rich, well-known, always at war. Kunal, the adopted son, believes he is “the chosen one.” He wants control, especially of the family business. Lila, born into the family, resists. She calls him entitled. Their fight exposes something raw: how power hides in gender and class.

Guha writes with sly observation. His sentences don’t shout. They smoulder. “You can lose a house in an earthquake, you can lose any investment in a recession, but education, you can’t lose. I believe,” there are layers of insight. 

His narration is elegant and witty. Every character feels made of bone and flesh—especially Brahm, a man shaped by loss and old ideals. He keeps a photograph of Bhagat Singh on his desk. Even in silence, he demands more of the world. His son Rohit, in contrast, turns angry, rants on YouTube.  

In Guha’s novel, Delhi is not just a city—it’s a character, a breathing place. And it is falling apart. The trees, the air, the light—everything is fading. The city decays, and we watch. Guha renders this decline. And what it feels like to live in its slow collapse.

'Delhi,' my father continued, 'well, there is no better place to see this than Delhi. What was Delhi? A perfect oasis. In the middle of a near-desert, a slice of green heaven, fed by a strong river. What have we made of Delhi? A place unfit for life. The river is a dry garbage dump. The water in our pipes is liquid refuse. The air- I won't tell you about the air. Every park is a monument to what we have done. What is a park? A temple of life. Our parks are temples of sickness. Every tree, every bird suffering, as if it has been told it must live but is stuck in a place no longer fit for living. Come to the mandi and you won't be able to show me one tomato that isn't sick and decaying.'

A strange coincidence: Ranthambhore, the national park, is the crown of my hometown. And it appears in the book. I won’t spoil the plot, but remember: the park matters and it holds weight in the story. The Tiger’s Share is a book about what we owe to each other, to our country, to the future. 

 About the Author

KESHAVA GUHA was born in Delhi and raised in Bangalore. He studied history and politics at Harvard, and writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. He writes regularly on politics, literature and sport for a host of publications. 

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Gulzar’s Caged: Memories Have Names | Translated by Sathya Saran

 

Title – Caged: Memories Have Names
Translated by – Sathya Saran 
Publisher – Penguin Hamish Hamilton
ISBN – 978-0670098231
Hardcover – 256 Pages
Buy – Amazon | Padhega India 

“I was trying to catch a butterfly. She escaped, but left her colours on my fingers.”

Gulzar opens his autobiography with a delicate image: a butterfly escapes from the poet’s grasp, but leaves its colours behind on his fingertips. Like a memory or trace of a loved one, the poet gathers its fleeting hues, whatever he can, and weaves them into verse.

Doesn’t the title Caged mislead at first? When I first heard it, the image of a prison came to my mind, a sense of forced confinement. But Gulzar, as always, reshapes the metaphor. The cage becomes an archive, a vessel for memory, and fragile memory needs to be preserved. These poems carry the names, the voices, the colours he refuses to let go.

Published as a bilingual edition, this book is a quiet gift to readers who know that to read Gulzar in the original is to hear the music whole. Sathya Saran has translated the book with grace. In her words, the process was “a journey through changing light,” a phrase that captures both the nature of memory and the pulse of his poetry.

Those who have read Actually, I Met Them... will recognise the theme: portraits, tributes, vignettes. But where that book offered prose, Caged is composed of more distilled and intimate poems. It’s less an autobiography than a play of light and shadow—part elegy, part celebration. The book is divided into four sections, the first anchored mainly in literary figures.

The first piece on Rabindranath Tagore — "a poet who stands like a crop, growing across all of Bengal." Gulzar recalls learning Bangla simply to read him. His lifelong reverence is no secret.

 

Then, Ghalib.

"ज़माना हर ज़बाँ में पढ़ रहा है अब,  तुम्हारे सब सुख़न ग़ालिब
समझते कितने हैं, ये तो वही समझें, या तुम समझो।"

 

Gulzar adds that he has read poets in every Indian language, but has never found another like Ghalib.

Across these pages, Shakespeare, Rumi, Jibanananda Das, and Nazim Hikmet emerge not merely as literary giants but as living presences, folded into the fabric of Gulzar’s memory. Neruda, Faiz, and Sunil Gangopadhyay each evoked not just for their words, but for the echo of their voices in his life. Take Namdeo Dhasal’s funeral, for instance: “even the flames from his pyre could not reduce the intensity of his poetry to ashes.” He was the people’s poet. A flag holder for the Dalit cause.

Gulzar is not just what he remembers, but how he remembers. There’s an anecdote with Kedarnath Singh: upon seeing the printed lyrics of Hamko Mann ki Shakti Dena, Singh was surprised. “Is this also written by you?” he asked. “This is sung in schools.” I bowed my head in acceptance. Then he said, “What a lucky man you are—tumhara kaam tumhare naam se aage nikal gaya.”

There is a poem dedicated to a girl with terminal cancer who once requested: “मुझको एक छोटे से शेर में सी दो / ‘अंजल’ लिखना / शायद मेरी आख़िरी शब है” And Gulzar, as promised, stitched her name into a verse. The gesture is tender, his writing shaped not by experience, but by empathy.

The book is rich with friendships—Javed Akhtar, Bimal Roy, Naseeruddin Shah. Of Shah, he writes: “Main adaakar hoon lekin / sirf adaakar nahin / waqt ki tasveer bhi hoon.” Gulzar also remembers Jagjit Singh: the very spirit of the ghazal, settled in him like musk in the navel of the deer. His voice, yes—but more than that, his thehrav, his ache.

Who can forget what he gave to Ghalib — Gulzar directing, Naseeruddin Shah inhabiting the poet, Jagjit giving voice to his wounds. Gulzar still calls it his most complete work. Perhaps because, for once, everything aligned. The finest artists, unguarded. And then—something like magic unfolds.

“उतरो आओ आँखों से काग़ज़ पर

तुम्हारी धुन पर कुछ अल्फ़ाज़ रख दूँ!”  

Pancham, Salil Chowdhury, Kanu Roy, all remembered not just as co-workers but as co-dreamers. Friends: in creation, in mischief, in melancholy. He remembers Asha Boudi—Asha Bhonsle—not with formality but with fondness, a sapling of musical notes, he calls her.

There are other memories, quieter, more aching. Of Meena: shutting her eyes, she fell asleep/ and died/ did not even take a breath afterwards/ after a long eventful life / filled with torturous trials/ how simple and easy her death!

‘Caged’ is a gallery of elegies, love letters to the departed. Some of the most piercing are reserved for Amjad Khan and Sanjeev Kumar. Gulzar writes not merely of their absence, but of what lingers. In his verses, death is not an end but a bond beyond flesh.

A sketch of a friend—Amjad Khan—whom he is about to bury: “Main neem-andheri qabr mein / sula raha tha jab use / woh neem-v-nigaah se / dekhta raha mujhe... / hatheliyon se aankh ke chirag bhi bhuja diye / ke do jahaan ke silsile / zameen par hi chuka diye.”

Gulzar does not mourn—because even in the silence of the grave, he listens for his breath.

The metaphysics of death, of what remains, and what must be buried, flicker through these verses. Sanjeev Kumar, too, appears as a confidant, someone Gulzar could tell what he couldn’t tell anyone else. Later, the lens widens, and more artists come into the light: Birju Maharaj and Hariprasad Chaurasia. And then a portrait of Van Gogh, whom he first encountered through Irving Stone’s Lust for Life, and he becomes a mirror to his own artistic struggles. In moments of despair, that biography was his guiding light.

The final chapter, the most personal one. Gulzar turns inward to his family. Rakhee, Meghna, and his grandson Samay. Pali, his dog, whom he never once called ‘Dog’. And, finally this brief poem, like a breath caught in the chest: "गिरह ऐसी लगी है जैसे कि नाभि का रिश्ता हो / जो कट जाने पर भी उम्र भर कटता नहीं है."

How does one write about Caged? It is not a memoir.  It is not poetry. It is a book of farewells and of bonds that refuse to loosen. A butterfly’s trace on the fingertips—never caught, never forgotten.  

About the Author

Gulzar, one of India's leading poets, is a greatly respected scriptwriter and film director. He has been one of the most popular lyricists in mainstream Hindi cinema, gaining international fame when he won an Oscar and a Grammy for the song 'Jai ho'. Gulzar received the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2002, the Padma Bhushan in 2004, the Dadasaheb Phalke Award in 2014 and the Jnanpith Award in 2024. He lived and works in Mumbai.

Translator
After 12 years as Editor of Femina which was declared a Superbrand, Sathya Saran chose to be a full-time author, part time teacher and a columnist. Her books include the acclaimed biographies, Ten Years with Guru Dutt Abrar Alvi’s Journey, Baat Niklegi toh Phir: The Life and Music of Jagjit Singh, Sun Mere Bandhu Re: The Musical World of SD Burman and Hariprasad Chaurasia: Breath of Gold. She also has a book of short stories The Dark Side. Caged is her first book as a translator. 

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