Depavali Sen
MY FATHER IS A HERO by Nishant Kaushik Srishti Publishers and Distributors, 2017, 199 pp., 195
November 2017, volume 41, No 11

Simple yet evocative is the cover, and so is the book within. Novelist Nishant Kaushik, with several popular titles to his credit, lives in Australia with his wife and son. In his Acknowledgement he has thanked them as well his parents. ‘This book is a token of respect’, he begins, ‘towards every father who has been a hero to his son. On top of this list of fathers is my own.’ He ends by saying to his son: ‘I hope you get to be as proud of your father as I am of mine.’ This would have been a hackneyed acknowledgement but for the fact that this novel is woven particularly around this theme.

There are deft touches which take you straight to it. In the very first chapter, the father Vaibhav Kulkarni, 35, drops his daughter Nisha, 10, on his bike to school, pulling over some fifty feet away from the school gate because he did not have the kind of car the others parents educating their children in the same elite institution of the expensive city of Pune did (p. 5).

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