Keeping in Touch by award-winning novelist Anjali Joseph is a love story centering Keteki Sharma and Ved Ved, two thirty-something individuals more or less settled in their hectic, jet-set lives. Though it is love at first sight for Ved, when he sees Keteki at Heathrow Airport in casual jeans and shirt, Keteki revels in her relationship with her new lover but takes her time making up her mind about settling down with him. Thus begins a dance of a relationship between two individuals entirely unknown to each other. As a freelance designer and curator, Keteki’s work profile makes travel imminent as does Ved’s who is a venture capitalist. Nearing forty now, Ved has been feeling the absence of familial warmth, love and affection and wants to settle down when he spots her but Keteki, thirty-nine, is wary of commitments, almost afraid to snuggle into a long-term relationship. Spanning across Assam and London, their relationship unfolds like a performance across continents, with Joseph filling in details of their lives.
Keeping in Touch is alternately fast-paced and slow moving and transports the reader into the myriad cultural scenarios of North East India and London city. Joseph describes the natural topography of river rich Assam, with its fertile land, verdant green fields on the one hand and on the other, its bustling, noisy, polluted cities teeming with youngsters who party hard and make merry with abandon.