By Shreyansh Ankit, PGPX 2024
Synopsis:
Ravi is a young man on the run, not just from the world, but from himself. Haunted by moths that follow him from place to place, he wanders through forgotten towns, ghost villages, and haunted memories across India’s hinterlands. In each place, a stranger is waiting for him, someone with a story to tell. But the stories are not random. They are fragments of a larger, buried truth: stories of erasure, displacement, violence, and memory. And somehow, Ravi is at the centre of all of them.
Over the course of thirty nights, Ravi encounters thirty people, a mapmaker who charts things the government doesn’t want mapped, a woman who remembers everything others wish to forget, a child who dies daily, a widow who speaks in codes, a town that remembers him even when he does not, and a man who tells Ravi’s own story before he has lived it.
The novel unfolds episodically, each chapter a self-contained tale that also forms part of a larger mosaic. These are tales of environmental erasure, communal grief, political suppression, and personal loss, all tinged with magical realism and poetic symbolism. Across it all looms the presence of Samar, a boy from Ravi’s childhood, long lost, possibly dead, possibly imagined, whose name begins to echo through dreams, stories, and broken mirrors.
The Weight of Forgotten Things is a literary novel of memory, loss, and haunting, part magical realism, part psychological mystery, and part social allegory. It is a meditation on the cost of forgetting and the fragile act of remembering. With its bittersweet ending and mosaic structure, it offers a deeply emotional reading experience, one that invites readers not just to read the story but to become a part of it.
About the author:
Shreyansh Ankit (PGPX 2024) is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad and currently serves as Associate Vice President at the IIMA Endowment Fund. He has previously written two novels: Seven Lives and Search for the Brahmastra, early forays into speculative fiction and layered narrative that laid the foundation for his current literary voice. With a background in public policy, insurance, and philanthropy, he brings a deeply human and nuanced perspective to his storytelling. The Weight of Forgotten Things is a literary exploration of memory, guilt, and forgotten lives set in the Indian hinterland. His writing draws inspiration from oral histories, displacement narratives, and the invisible emotional cartographies that shape our lives.
