Read This Book Before September 31st
Vennela Poluru is eleven years old, has leukaemia, and has never been to school.
In a Bengaluru cancer ward she overhears a doctor tell her parents that without the next cycle of treatment she has perhaps two months. She does not hear it as a warning. She hears it as a sentence. It is late July, and two months - by the only calendar she has ever studied, the faded one in the corridor that nobody has ever turned - ends on the thirty-first of September.
She does not want the treatment, because it will take her hair. She does not want her father to borrow again, because she has heard the word lakhs said in a certain tone. And a dying woman in the next bed has told her that in Kashi, Shiva either saves you or takes you home, and either way it is finished.
So she walks out of the hospital with a notebook under her frock, seven hundred and eighty-five stolen rupees, and four facts. On the first page of the notebook, in her own spelling, she leaves her father an instruction and a deadline.
A novel about a preventable death caused by a child's flawless reasoning from wrong premises - and about the auto driver who follows her two thousand kilometres north with the wrong photograph in his hand.
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