Punjab [India], June 15: “Our decisions carry the weight of our desires and guilt, of love and loss, and whatever it is that lies in between. Yet, there is no escape but to live with them. Pashmina is a collection of such stories that take you along on journeys of various characters that try to be at peace with all of that and more.”
Harmanjeet Singh Punia
Life, as we know it, is a mixed bag of joys and sorrows, of resentments and fulfillments, and a whole lot of choices, both right and wrong. And we have to carefully chart our journey through this dense maze of emotions that tend to get heavy on us from time to time. Pashmina by Harmanjeet Singh Punia is a book that reflects on all of that through the eyes of various characters. Set in a contemporary world, the book brings out different human emotions, highlights the dilemmas of confused young lives, and portrays the pain and suffering quite realistically through its nine short stories.
The theme that forms the crux of the stories is primarily loss. But, since all the stories are different in approach and settings, you get a healthy dose of various other emotions.
Two stories, Bismil and The Ticket portray longing quite beautifully. The characters in the story, Pashmina and Darling, deal with the heartbreak and its haunting consequences, while the childhood traumas in The Ice-Cream, The Turn, and The Primary Teacher break your heart in an all-new way. Whereas Daisy is a story based on a unique relation and The Helper, too, throws some surprises for you.
The heartfelt portrayal of the lives of these characters has already won many hearts, particularly Daisy, Bismil, and The Ticket. As an author, Harman has written a compelling collection of moving stories that mirror our real-life scenarios in a haunting manner in his debut work. It was his dream come true to see his stories get published and released to a heartwarming response. He’s an avid reader and sincerely loves reading the classics of Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Victor Hugo, The Brontë Sisters Jaswant Singh Kanwal, and Gurdial Singh. He lives with his family in the countryside district of Fatehgarh Sahib, Punjab, and did M.Sc. in Physics from Punjabi University, Patiala. For a brief period, he taught as a lecturer in a Polytechnic College. However, due to his love for literature, he took a job that would leave him with more time for reading and penning down his thoughts.
He is also a poet, and his second book, a collection of poetry ‘Khudgarziyaan’, is about to be released soon. As of today, he is working on two more projects, a novel and another collection of short stories that will follow soon.
You can get in touch with him on his Instagram handle @harman_punia23
If you are in for some intense and dramatic story-telling, then Pashmina is the book for you, available in Paperback and Kindle. Grab your copy from:
https://www.amazon.in/Harmanjeet-Singh-Punia/e/B08DRMKS5Y?ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vu00_tkin_p1_i0
The book is also available on Google Playbooks.
