Cuts

When Rajavijayan, a Tamil tea picker, murders a top official – the tea taster – of a tea estate in Sri Lanka, the young man is forced to flee to Nepal via India.

Traveling through the wild and hilly country, Rajavijayan chances upon a swamiji (Hindu mystic) living in the Nepalese mountains. With the swamiji’s help, he gets a job at the nearby tea plantation at the foot of the Himalayan Mountains. Here he hopes to conceal his identity and live a normal, quiet life.

But the wanted man is slowly drawn in by the spiritual teacher, moving him to live with the old guru in his cave, where Rajavijayan sets upon a journey of inner enlightenment. He seeks divine secrets, and most importantly, acceptance from his new master.

And when the son of the man Rajavijayan murdered is supposed to arrive at the Nepalese tea plantation, the killer-turned-neophyte will have to face his crime, and reconcile with whom he must keep the temple running as per his master’s final instructions.

With The Payyoli Pendant, published by Strategic Books in 2009, Mohan Narayanan, hailing from a remote village in South India, shot into the international literature arena. CUTS is his sixth novel in eight years. His books are extremely popular with American, European, and Japanese readers. All have been rated 4.5/5-stars, and each book enjoys over 100,000 downloads as a pdf. “My father took up a teaching job in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), and we lived in the foothills of a tea estate in Hatton, the place I have used in the book,” he explains. The author taught business management (MBA Studies) at two of India’s top universities, and is also an engineering and management consultant.