Since Letters That Never Crossed Nainital ended, one message keeps arriving in some form or another: what happens next? Or what is the title of the next book?
I don't have a title to give you yet. But I have a place.
The Question I Can't Fully Answer Yet
Letters That Never Crossed Nainital was a book about distance, about words that were written and never sent, about two people who stayed apart because neither of them moved first. I spent a long time inside that story, and when it ended, I assumed I'd need to write something completely different next.
Instead, I found myself somewhere else entirely: standing on Carter Road in Bandra, most evenings, not writing anything at all. Just watching.
If Nainital was about what we don't say across distance, this next one started as a question about what happens when the distance disappears, when the person you'd have written a letter to is, instead, close enough to see. That's the honest bridge between the two books, even before either has a name.
I want to be upfront about something: I don't think this next book would exist in its current shape if I hadn't spent a year answering messages about Nainital. So much of what people asked me, about the letters, about why the characters waited so long, about whether they'd have made different choices up close, became questions I couldn't stop turning over. Carter Road is where I ended up turning them over out loud, without realizing it.
Why a Road, and Not a Hill Station This Time
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Nainital was built on distance in the most literal sense: a hill station, a different altitude, letters that had to travel to reach anyone. It made sense for a story about things left unsaid across space.
This next one needed the opposite kind of geography: a place where nothing is far. Carter Road is barely a kilometre of promenade. The café where most of this story starts is close enough to the railing that you could, in theory, shout something across the road and be heard. There's no excuse of distance here, no letter that had to travel three hundred kilometres to be misunderstood. Whatever gets left unsaid on Carter Road gets left unsaid on purpose, standing a few metres away from the person it's about. That's a different, harder kind of silence to write, and it's the one I wanted to sit inside next.
What You Notice When You Actually Slow Down
Carter Road moves fast if you let it. Traffic near Hill Road doesn't wait. The evening crowd doesn't pause. But there's a version of the promenade that only shows up once you stop trying to get somewhere.
- The way the sea changes colour before the rain does. Long before the first drop falls, the water goes a shade darker, almost warning you — and almost nobody on the promenade seems to notice it happening except the fishermen packing up early.
- The regulars who don't know they're regulars. The same elderly couple, walking the same stretch, at the same unhurried pace, most evenings — never speaking, always together, always turning back at exactly the same bench.
- Umbrellas as a kind of character. Not just rain gear — the way someone holds an umbrella, offers half of it to a stranger, or keeps it resolutely to themselves, says more about them than a page of dialogue would. I started watching umbrellas the way other writers watch hands.
- The five-minute window after the rain stops, when the promenade empties out and the joggers haven't returned yet, and for a moment the whole road feels like it belongs to whoever's still standing there.
- How a café can hold two years without changing its furniture. The wooden tables, a lamp that flickers and gets fixed, a shelf that gets moved a few feet — barely anything, and yet everything about who sits there changes completely.
- The sound before the sight. A local train rumbling somewhere behind Hill Road, always there, rarely acknowledged, the way background noise becomes part of a person's idea of home without them ever choosing it.
- What a coffee stain outlives. A table gets used by dozens of people a week. A stain that nobody bothers to scrub away starts to belong to whoever sat there first, long after they've stopped coming.
- How grey the sea can get without ever looking the same grey twice. Mumbai's monsoon sky has more range than people give it credit for, once you're actually paying attention instead of just waiting for the rain to stop so you can leave.
None of this makes it into a synopsis. It's not plot. But it's the material a book actually gets built out of, long before there's a title on a cover.
From Letters to a Look Across a Road
If you've read Nainital, you'll recognise the instinct underneath both books, even though the settings couldn't be more different: I keep returning to the gap between what a person feels and what they actually say out loud. In Nainital, that gap was filled with paper — letters drafted, some sent, most not. On Carter Road, there's no letter to hide behind. There's just a look across a road, held a second too long, and everything that happens after someone decides not to look away.
That's the closest thing I can give you to a plot description right now. Not a summary — a shift in instrument. Same question about silence and distance, played on a different kind of gap.
Why I'm Telling You This Now
I could wait until there's a full announcement, a cover, a title, a release date, before saying anything. But readers who finished Letters That Never Crossed Nainital and asked what's next deserve more than silence until the marketing is ready. You get to see the place before you get the story, the same way I did.
So: no title yet. But if you've read Nainital and you're waiting, this is where the next one is coming from. A road by the sea in Bandra. A café that doesn't change its furniture. A detail, I'm not telling you which one yet, that undoes two years of trying to move on.
A Few Things You've Asked
Is this a sequel to Letters That Never Crossed Nainital? No, different characters, different city, a standalone story. The connection is thematic, not a continuation of the same plot. This time it's based in Mumbai.
When will there be a title and release date? I'm sharing the world behind the book first, the setting, the mood, a few of the details it's built from, before the title and cover. Follow along and you'll see it revealed in stages, not all at once. As a marketing guy I need to plan it well.
Is Carter Road a real place? Yes. It's a real promenade in Bandra, Mumbai, and most of what's described above is observed rather than invented.
Stay Close to This One
If you want to be the first to know when there's a title, a cover, and a release date, join the Channel: Join Now .I'll be sharing more of Carter Road — the café, the rain, the one image the whole book turns on one piece at a time before the full reveal.
Read Letters That Never Crossed Nainital? I'd genuinely love to know what you thought — reply or tag me, and I'll be sharing your reactions as I build toward this next one.
