Three Striped Hyenas

Abstract

Vincent, a 36-year-old television writer and a failed novelist, runs into an old pen-friend, a visual artist named Mrs. Nair, on the day he has planned to commit suicide. What unfolds is a day-and-a-night-long conversation through which the novel traces the lives of Vincent and the friends—Miriam and the Hyenas—with whom he grew up in Mumbai (India). Vincent has come back from Canada, and he is struggling with the deaths of his parents and Miriam. Three Striped Hyenas is a meditation on grief, memory, place, and belonging, observing the effects of deteriorating mental health, nostalgia, and deaths of loved ones on the psyche of a creative writer for whom, much like the blurred lines between his reality and fiction, time and place have become amorphous.