If I Die Today

If I Die Today is an incisive and compelling picture of murder and what it does to a community.

Guru, an end-stage cancer patient, comes to a quiet medical campus and quickly befriends his hosts friends and neighbours, his warmth and sympathetic manner encouraging them to confide in him. Out of these conversations emerges a name Prabhakar Tambe which spreads a pall of uneasiness over the doctors and triggers a chain of events that leads to catastrophic results.

Rumours start to fly, old tensions and rivalries between colleagues and friends re- surface, and every family on the campus is caught in a web of suspicion. Within weeks, two people die in mysterious circumstances and it seems that life will never be the same again for the doctors and their families.

Shashi Deshpande is the author of ten novels, a number of short story collections, four books for children and a book of essays. Her best known novel, That Long Silence, which won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1990, is considered a landmark in Indian writing in English. Among her recent novels are Small Remedies, Moving On, In the Country of Deceit and Ships That Pass. She has also done translations from both Kannada and Marathi into English. Shashi Deshpande currently lives in Bangalore.