Rudrabaan (Cursed Elements) by Nitya Neelakantan

A café owner who is haughty and entitled. An event planner who is earnest and acquiescent. A curse that was cast an eternity ago…

Shruthakeerthi Urs aka. Shruti is the client from hell. Jaideep Rai is the hot new event planner who bring out the shrew in Shruti. Tempers fly and egos clash even as they attempt to work together on an event.
Fate brings them face to face again when they both sign up for the same Jungle Challenge adventure, traversing the mountains and forests of the Western Ghats of India. Forced to work together they snarl and spar at every given chance, refusing to admit that they may be hankering for something amorous with the other…a simmering undercurrent of passion!
And what happens when one of them is cursed? Can they put aside their differences and come together to break a curse that has sounded the death knell for generations of one of their families? Amidst surprise revelations, mystic mendicants, and repressed memories, can the two work out the pieces of the puzzle that can break the curse?
Will Shruti and Jaideep survive this epic adventure and find love, or will they remain ships passing in the night…

Rudrabaan is an adventure filled story peppered with magical realism and hued with some regular hate to love drama.

Book Links:
Goodreads * Amazon.in * Amazon.com

Read an Excerpt from Rudrabaan

Shruti looked into his eyes to see if she could read anything. There was a storm of emotions looking back at her from those liquid-brown eyes. Shruti leaned forward. Jaideep lowered his head. His hair was a mess as it fell to his face, and he shook his head to get it out of his eyes. It was as if he had words on his lips that refused to spill when he opened his mouth.

‘What is it, Jaideep?’

‘It’s nothing, you’ve to believe me.’ He wanted to tell Shruti about the mendicant and his prophetic words, but he couldn’t bring himself to say it. ‘Now how are we going to get out from here?’ he said instead. He smiled a forced and toothy smile to make her believe.

‘Ok, you see that?’ she pointed her torch at the dark wall of the cave somewhere to their left. 

‘What am I seeing?’

‘Well, there is a crawl space there that will get us out of this chamber.’

She thought she saw his eyes widen for a moment. She wondered why.

‘I was too afraid to go down that,’ he admitted, reading her mind. ‘You are so brave.’

‘It might be very tricky considering your chest wounds and your injured leg. But it was large enough to crawl through.’

Jaideep nodded with an inert look of resignation. Shruti helped him up and was busy picking up all their stuff when he grabbed her just above the elbow. 

‘Listen.’

There was a faint crackling noise in the cave. 

‘What is that sound?’ Shruti asked, sounding hopeful. Maybe someone was drilling through the cave walls, looking for them? 

Jaideep’s eyes narrowed, and the corner of his lip turned down as he pulled Shruti and twirled her around; he was pointing at the place where she had shone her torchlight a heartbeat ago. 

Shruti’s heart stopped beating for a moment or more. There were sparkles of light near the mouth of the tunnel and the crackling became louder. Within seconds, it became a loud buzzing noise like that of a hundred angry bees. 

Shruti dropped everything she was holding and rubbed her eyes. There was no way this was happening to her in a rational and scientific world. 

‘You’re seeing this, right?’ she managed to whisper.

Jaideep started limping towards the tunnel. ‘No!’ Shruti caught him by the wrist and held him tight. Jaideep turned to look at Shruti. She looked scared, he looked determined. 

Both of them blurted the words simultaneously: ‘There is something I need to tell you!’ 

Even as they looked at each other and back at the sparkles, it self-combusted into smoke and in its place was an arrow! A flaming arrow!

About the Author:

Nitya Neelakantan is a writer and yoga teacher from Bangalore. She has three paperback novels that are awaiting publication with Rupa Publications and Readomania. 

Nitya graduated with a degree in Hotel Management before moving into the learning space as a technical trainer and then a soft skills trainer. Her writing and yoga journey began simultaneously as she hung up her corporate boots in exchange for more time with her two and four-legged family. 

When not teaching or reading, Nitya enjoys travelling with her husband, son, and two fluffy dog-babies.  She is an amateur blogger who is also passionate about composting, slow fashion, and conscious living.

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