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It's Giveaway Time in collaboration with @penguinindia

This giveaway would be valid from 25th October to 1st Nov 2026.

There will be one winner, who would receive the paperback copy of The Scent of the Nameless.

Rules for the giveaway:

1. Follow @penguinindia @jainands_diary @escapingtheordinary_

2. Share the post on your story mentioning the hosts. (private accounts Dm the screenshot)

3. Tag 3 friends in the comments who would also like to participate. Multiple comments are allowed.

4. Repost this post.

Extra points:

1. If you share the post daily till 1st November on your stories.

2. Follow @geetchaturvedi27 and @anitagopalan16

Winners should be a resident of India. And if under 18, should have parental permission to share the address upon winning.

Winners will be announced by 3rd November 2026.

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What happens when the price of an ordinary life becomes too much to pay?

Scent of the Nameless by Geet Chaturvedi, translated from Hindi by Anita Gopalan, takes us into the unsettling world of consumerism, financial humiliation, and the invisible inequalities shaping our lives. But how much of this story is fiction, and how much of this reflects the world we live in?

Join us for an Instagram Live discussion as we - @jainands_diary and @escapingtheordinary_ - dive into this thought-provoking novel, exploring its themes, its unsettling portrayal of ordinary life, and the questions it leaves us with.

🗓️ 28 October 2026
⏰ 6:30 PM IST
📍 Live on Instagram

See you soon 💫💌

About #LetsReadIndianAuthors :
We’ve been talking about reading more Indian authors for a while, so we thought - why not actually make it a habit?

#LetsReadIndianAuthors is our little initiative to explore the incredible range of Indian writing, one book at a time. Every month, we’ll pick one Indian book and read it together. Our reading timeline will be 15th to 15th of every month, so you can read at your own pace, in your own mood - no pressure, no rules. Because there are some amazing writers in our country, telling stories worth discovering - and as Indian readers, supporting and reading our own literature feels like the least we can do.

So, pick up a book. Give an Indian author a chance.

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For our first edition of #LetsReadIndianAuthors we (@escapingtheordinary_ and @jainands_diary ) read the Scent of the Nameless by Geet Chaturvedi, translated by Anita Gopalan.

And so we thought to also introduce them to you - and bring some exclusive answers from them too. Swipe to see the post and shower some love on our very own Indian authors/translators.

If you have any questions for them, drop them below.

Also if we hold a discussion for this book - would you join in?

(Indian literature, indian authors, indian translators, indian books, books by Indian authors, translated books, translated literature)

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Scent of the Nameless by Geet Chaturvedi, translated from Hindi by Anita Gopalan

Wow! What have I just read? This was genuinely my first reaction after finishing this book.

It starts with a nameless man irritated by the smell of Cow-urine (Goumutra) on his armpits, and somehow, that strange detail stays with you throughout the book. From there, we follow the ordinary life of a middle-class office clerk living in a rented apartment in Mumbai with his wife and daughter, both of whom are nameless too. His wife is referred to as the cook woman, the laundry woman, the tea woman, the sleeping woman, and I found that particularly interesting. It's almost as if her entire identity is reduced to the things she does. Even his daughter feels more like a background presence in his life than a person with an identity of her own.

And then there's the debt. What begins with a credit card slowly turns into something much bigger, and watching this man's life unravel is both fascinating and deeply unsettling. The way debt starts consuming his dignity, his peace of mind, and eventually his sense of reality felt painfully human to me. There's something so strange about this man, yet something so familiar too. His thoughts, his frustrations, his absurd experiences, everything feels bizarre until you realise how much of it reflects the world we live in.

I especially loved how the novel blends satire with these increasingly surreal, almost hallucinatory moments. His boss Baba's dreams of Gandhi and Che, and his own dreams of Ganeshwar and others, the strange encounters, the fear of being murdered, the bank agent following him everywhere, the finance minister, and the references to people crushed under debt, including farmers. Everything feels like it's spiralling out of control, yet there's an uncomfortable sense of reality underneath it all. I kept wondering where his reality ended and his hallucinations began.
(Continued in comments)

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#ScentOfTheNameless #GeetChaturvedi #BookReview #LiteraryFiction #CurrentlyReading

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Okay what did I just read 🫣 I was seeing all the praises on my feed for Scent of the Nameless by Geet Chaturvedi, translated by Anita Gopalan, but I wasn't prepared for it to be this level of intellectual writing. Sometimes I'm so glad some books reach me, making my shelves a proud space.

The story starts with an unnamed middle-class man in Mumbai, living with his wife and daughter and working as a clerk. His life begins to change when a credit card enters it. For us credit card is just another financial tool but we saw how in this novel everything starts to change because of this. Infact as many people also said, I liked the fact how the author uses that situation to ask a much more uncomfortable question: how much of what we call choice is actually our choice when the world around us is designed to make us consume?

His financial anxiety doesn't remain isolated but contaminated all parts of his life. The writing and translation in these scenes were so nicely done where we see the strangeness and creepiness seep here.

I liked how while the character's financial status was deteriorating, the author shows a shift in his behavior as a man. His relationship with his wife becomes increasingly complicated and toxic. And how he deals with them is quite interesting.

The writing is great, I won't say it's easy but it's not a light or fast read. There are moments where you'll be feeling so strange but that is necessary. The novel's strongest idea, for me, is that debt here is much larger than money. It becomes a condition of living. Because it does dictate a lot of things, specially our perceptions.

There are so many more things I want to talk about, a second post is coming soon. I'm just glad our first #letsreadindianauthors pick was this.

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Scent of the Nameless by Geet Chaturvedi translated by Anita Gopalan is a strange, bewildering, and at times, thought-provoking book about credit cards, which insidiously and gradually takes over the life of an ordinary middle-class office-goer in Mumbai.

The main character is an average Mumbai local, a clerk with a family of his own. Debt, which starts as a side guest in the household, grows rapidly out of control, engulfing all areas of the protagonists’ lives and changing them irreversibly. However, it is not the devastating financial situation and the loss of comfort associated with it that bothered me on the way through the narrative. What bothered me was the constant uncertainty about what was real and what was a product of the main character’s troubled conscience. The weird smell of cow urine, delusions, and generally surreal surroundings are the leitmotifs of this novel, in which the ubiquitous problems of an ordinary person turn out to be incredibly threatening.

On the other hand, I found the ambiguity of the protagonist’s name quite fascinating. Perhaps it is not accidental that he does not have a name, or maybe he had too many names in his troubled life. Either way, such a characteristic suits him to the last, signifying that he has become one of those faceless, average people, whose existence is now a permanent part of the system.

The whole book is a great example of how consumer culture can turn the most basic desires into a form of self-flagellation. Fortunately, the lasting impression that the novel left on me concerns not only the drawbacks of credit-based transactions but also the many positive aspects of the literary translation process. In particular, I found the afterword of the translator, revealing the critical details of the book’s creation, to be really engaging. It allowed me to perceive the work with even greater interest and excitement, noticing new nuances, and understanding them on a deeper level.

The book was disturbing and confusing, but the emotional experience of reading remained mostly positive. It made me think about a lot of different things – shame, anxiety, and the sense of identity in a modern person, in whom,

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☕A credit card that was supposed to fuel the dreams of a middle class family, becomes a noose for the same family. Wonder why?

☕The main character is an ordinary office worker living in a small Mumbai apartment with his wife and young daughter. At first, his life is quiet, peaceful, and simple. But everything changes when he gets a credit card. What starts as a handy tool quickly turns into a huge trap. He begins buying things he does not need, and before he knows it, unpaid bills and debt start piling up.

☕What makes this book so relatable is how honest it feels. You watch how money worries can slowly mess up a person's family life, respect, and peace of mind. As the stress grows, the story gets a bit strange and wild, making you feel the exact confusion and fear that the main character is going through. It shows how easy it is to fall into the trap of spending money just to feel important or to match what others are doing. I just loved the first chapter. The metaphorical reference with a lyrical descriltion just puts this book in my list of must reads this year.

☕I found this story deeply moving and a little scary because it feels like something that could happen to anyone in a big city. It is a short, powerful read about family, choices, and how one small card can turn life upside down.

#scentofthenameless #translatedwork #fiction #2026reads

[Scent of the Nameless, translated work, hindi translation, for you page, explore page, new post, best reads of 2026, fiction, domestic fiction]

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Scent of the Nameless

An ordinary life changed with the markets and the economy.

In this book the reality hits you and it does it fast as soon as the book opens it is doing it's work.

Living in Urban India is chaos which slowly dies to being done and alone with a rising pressure of survival or rather how to survive.

There are scenarios where the main character states hypothetical rather you call them hallucinations situations that incite an understanding inside you that something is stirring and it's so beyond our hand and we feel like we are drowning.

Life slowly dies we forget living forget having a smile on our faces women just became the carer rather than the actual equal partner.
This book depicts how urbanisation has killed humanity and its happiness all good days are over all we do is stress about loans and debts and panicking forever and loving never, no we don't have the time because again we are tightly packed from toe to head with the ways we think and overthink about our situation.

An important book for the era we are living in.

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A purchase by a credit card seems very alluring... until debt begins to eat away at your reality."

Scent of the Nameless by Geet Chaturvedi (translated from Hindi by Anita Gopalan) is a deeply unsettling, brilliant meditation on modern capitalism, consumerism, and psychological decay.

The story follows an unnamed middle-class office clerk in Mumbai leading a quiet, routine life with his wife and daughter. Everything shifts when he gets a credit card. What begins as a simple modern convenience quickly spirals into a crippling trap of debt. But this isn't just a financial tragedy: it is a full-scale psychological unraveling.

As the weight of his humiliation and debt deepens, the boundaries between reality, hallucination, and absurd surrealism blur. From bizarre visions and Kafkaesque moments (like a watch transforming into an earthworm) to the persistent, inescapable phantom smell of cow urine under his armpits, Chaturvedi captures the terrifying way financial anxiety can morph into paranoia and madness.

A Relatable Social Mirror It delivers a sharp, honest reality check on plastic money, instant gratification, and the hidden violence of economic inequality.

Hallucinatory and Lyrical Prose The writing shifts effortlessly from coarse and jagged rants to tender moments with the protagonist's daughter. Anita Gopalan's translation captures a rhythmic, musical flow that keeps you completely hooked.

Unforgettable Scenes High-impact chapters, from encounters with the Finance Minister to the dog-chasing sequence, leave you constantly questioning what is real and what is hallucinated.

A Masterclass Afterword The Translator's Afterword by Anita Gopalan acts as an extraordinary literary piece on its own, casting the entire narrative in a fresh light and making you want to reread the book immediately.

Part Kafkaesque nightmare, part Dostoyevskian study of internal suffering, Scent of the Nameless is a quiet yet piercing wake-up call. It forces us to ask where we draw the line between our material desires and our peace of mind.

A haunting, thought-provoking, and essential read for lovers of literary fiction! 📚✨

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One of my favourite reads of this year! And I cannot stop gushing about it, and so the caption wasn't enough to show the whole review here, so go and check the slides!

Read this for #LetsReadIndianAuthors which is a little initiative by @escapingtheordinary_ and I to explore the incredible range of Indian writing, one book at a time, where every month, we’ll pick one Indian book and read it together. Our reading timeline will be 15th to 15th of every month, so if you want to join, you can read at your own pace, in your own mood - no pressure, no rules. And this is our very first book and I couldn't have hoped for a better one than this.

Also, read it for #explorethediversityreadathon2026 a readathon @escapingtheordinary_ and I (again!) organised in September each year for 5 years now to promote more diverse literature from India, and I read it for a book translated from an Indian Language.

Also, I really loved this cover artwork and design by Amogh Bhatnagar and Shadab Khan, respectively.

Thank you @readwithus_bookclub @penguinindia for the book 💫❤️

Have you read any books translated from Hindi? Any favourites? Let me know in the comments.

#jainands_diary

(Scent of the nameless, Geet Chaturvedi, Anita Gopalan, Goumutra, Hindi translation, hindi books, indian literature, indian books in translation, indian authors, indian translation, hindi book translation, literary fiction, indian books, favourite books, books worth reading)

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*book review*

Book: Scent of the Nameless by @geetchaturvedi translated by @anitagopalan16 ✨✍️

The book tells the story of Gomutra, a middle-class man living in Mumbai with his wife Gauri and daughter Gudiya. His life is quite normal in the beginning, but things slowly start changing when a credit card becomes a part of his life. 💳

He starts spending more, and what seems helpful at first soon becomes a big problem. The bills and debt keep increasing, bringing stress into his everyday life. It also starts affecting his relationship with Gauri and the peaceful life of his family. The story shows how difficult it can become when someone gets stuck in a cycle of spending and debt. 🏙️

There are also some unusual and strange moments in the book. At times, it became difficult to separate what is actually happening from what Gomutra is imagining. This gives the story a different feel and also shows how much pressure he is going through. 🌫️

The book talks about money, family, social pressure and our wish to have a better lifestyle. Through Gomutra's life, it shows how one small financial decision can slowly change many things. ✨

#qotd: Do you think modern life pushes us to buy more than we actually need?

Pages: 207📃
Language: English ✨
Genre: Literary Fiction 🙌

#translatedbook #booknerdscornerrrr #readwithusbookclub #indianbook

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Scent of the Nameless by Geet Chaturvedi, translated by Anita Gopalan, is a gripping and darkly funny exploration of modern life in urban India. The story follows an ordinary middle-class office clerk living in Mumbai whose quiet, predictable life begins to unravel after getting a credit card. What starts as a simple convenience quickly turns into a trap of endless debt, shedding light on how consumer culture, money, and power subtly control our daily choices.

With its blend of sharp satire, deep psychological tension, and absurdly vivid moments, this book offers a hauntingly real look at the struggles of middle-class survival. It is a short yet powerful read that stays with you long after you turn the final page.

#scentofthenameless #bookreview #indianliterature #bookstagram #geetchaturvedi

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