Living With Smoke

It was either the end; or it was the beginning. How could one possibly know? When his marriage fails and business falls in quick succession, both during the thick of an economic recession, Sujoy Prem feels he is at the end. A young woman, a fresh management grad though, feels that it is not yet the end. Nisha John persists in following the once-successful Sujoy as she persuades him to make a comeback. Sujoy, however, prefers to run away from what is necessarily the only thing he will ever be good at. Hardly did each know what was in store until Smoke came in. Shabby and outrageously impolite, Smoke would be any man's last choice for a roommate. Yet, here he is, sharing a room with the extremely systematic perfectionist that is Sujoy. There is more to Smoke though. He is a man with an imperfect past and shuns talking about it. Yet, as each look beyond the other's differences, they see a new life ahead. Nisha, meanwhile, finds herself increasingly drawn into the love of her life, all the while keeping secrets close to her heart; secrets that could expose her for all that she was deep inside. Will Sujoy seize at his second chance? Will Smoke regain everything he almost lost once? Will Nisha realize her folly and fall back in love?
About the Author: Suhail Rasheed works as a senior executive for an organizational brand consultancy firm. In his free time, he writes short stories and some long ones. As a child of eight or nine, Suhail first started writing spurred by an unending chain of imagination and inspired by the number of books he used to read, thanks to his parents and relatives. In 2009, he completed his first full-length novella, Living with Smoke, which is now published on the Kindle platform. Towards the end of 2011, in a period plagued with writer's block and short-term insomnia, Suhail would lie in bed tapping on his iPad trying to consolidate his thoughts into writing something meaningful. It was on one of those nights that a new mode of writing emerged for him and the first of Suhail's poems was written, thereby ending his bout of insomnia. Ever since, Suhail has written several poems, some of which await publication in both print and electronic media. Suhail's writings are a reflection of his deepest thoughts on the life he sees and feels around him. Suhail is thirty and presently lives with his wife & two children in Bangalore, India. He is currently working on Alone in Tango, a novel that is expected to be completed by mid-2013.