A Paradox Of Dreams was my first read of any of Harshali Singh’s books. Part three of the Havel series, A Paradox of Dream is not dependent on its predecessors and can be read independently, exactly what I have done.
The Blurb (as on Amazon)
We have Charu Sharma – the third daughter of the Sharmas who had lost her eyesight at the age of 11 due to retinal detachment. Along with the main plot of the story, we also travel through Charu’s life which is divided into two parts – before blindness and after blindness. Because Charu did live with perfect vision for some years, she was aware of things around her yet was currently living her life as a visually impaired person. The house they live in is Anwar Haveli and Charu shares a close bond with the house itself.
When Charu lost the vision in her eyes, she gained a sixth sense. She grew up to assist the police department’s special investigative team as an important team member and worked directly under the Commissioner of Police. In a Paradox of Dreams, we see Charu help solve a child’s kidnapping and open a pandora’s box about the lives of most people involved in this story along with her own past.
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Ravi Nair is Charu’s partner in work and in personal life. They have been together since a while now, and they understand each other well to the level of knowing what their silence and mute actions also mean. They both, along with Reeti, another team member, are summoned by minister Prithvi Chauhan to find his kidnapped daughter.
Prithvi and Charu grew up together and the story hints at them being in a relationship as kids. The relationship ended when Prithvi disappeared without keeping in touch and after some time, even Charu moved on in life.
But the morning that Ravi proposes to Charu, she gets a call from Prithvi. He is a minister now and has moved to a bungalow two houses down the lane, and wants Charu and her team to solve the case without involving the police formally.
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Prithvi’s daughter Myra had been picked up from her crib and disappeared into thin air while there were four other adults in the house. Everyone was a suspect and there were no visible clues. A lot depended on Charu’s sixth sense and power of observation to unravel the mystery and bring back the child before she came to any major harm.
Other characters in the story that we keep seeing come up are the nanny, Prithvi’s wife & mother-in-law, his guru, his cousin Manik who comes around to the house to teach his older daughter Sia, and the servants & guards. Only the family including Manik are allowed to the second floor of the house where the family resides so it was evident that it was an inside job. Everyone was a suspect, and everyone had a motive.
Nothing had prepared Charu, Ravi, and Reeti for the spine chilling revelation that resulted from their investigation. In between, Prithvi posed as a distraction, reminding Charu of the past and tried to pull her back with him, while she fought hard to not allow him to become a blind spot.
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A Paradox of Dreams is not just a book about a crime investigation. It is also a class of emotions and personalities, a peep into the darkness all the characters lived with, the compromises they all had to make to just survive, and the wicked evil that resided inside some of them.
Harshali Singh is a skilled story teller and this book kept me rooted to its pages till late into the night until I could find out what had happened actually. A page-turner, the story has many subplots which keep the reader’s attention on alert so they don’t miss anything important. The characters are well-developed. What I loved most is the sensitivity with which Charu’s visual impairment is handled, and how her sixth sense and its plausibility is explained. While reading the book, I spotted a tweet by Harshali where she explained how she did this.
Charu, the protagonist in A Paradox of Dreams, is a blind girl. I visited facilities where I could observe women with this specific disadvantage. My training as an Occupational Therapist helped me understand the coping mechanisms of people who have lost a sense. #aparadoxofdreams
— Harshali Singh (@harshalisingh) April 21, 2022
But the book: A Paradox Of Dreams
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Read my ebook WRITE. EDIT. PROMOTE. to learn the basics about becoming an author – from writing your own book, to editing your first draft, and to promoting your book yourself! You can also read my ebook How To Write A Story Effectively and learn some valuable lessons about how a story can go from average to extraordinary. This book is part 1 of the series.
In fiction, I have two short stories for children in an ebook called Bedtime Stories.
