THE SECRETS OF MY UNIVERSE: Silk Route

Wednesday, September 3, 2025

'Silk Route' by Sachin Kundalkar Refuses to Stay Still: Queer Longings and Lifetimes in Motion

Silk Route (Monochrome, #1) by Sachin Kundalkar

Book Review by Dhiraj Sindhi

Silk Route (Monochrome, #1) by Sachin Kundalkar

Author: Sachin Kundalkar

Translator: Aakash Karkare

ISBN: 978-0143477808

Genre: Queer Literary Fiction

Length: 120 Pages

Publication Date: 25^th July 2025

Publisher: Penguin Books

Cover Photo: Anuraag Banerjee and Cover Design: Amit Malhotra

Order your copy right now: https://amzn.to/3HP1zQp

About the Author:

Sachin Kundalkar is National Award-winning film maker with twelve Indian feature films to his credit, a screen writer whose work has been adapted into multiple Indian languages including Hindi and Malayalam. He is the author of the celebrated novel ‘Cobalt Blue’ which he wrote in Marathi when he was twenty-three years old. The novel by now has been translated into English, Hindi, Kannada, and Sinhala and has been adapted into a visually stunning feature film.

Sachin Kundalkar | Photo Credit: KUMAR SS

Instagram: @sachincobaltblue

About the Translator:

Aakash Karkare is a writer and translator based in Mumbai. He has worked across film, photography, and journalism, with experience in documentary filmmaking and as a former film critic with Scroll. His debut memoir is forthcoming from Rupa.

Aakash Karkare | Photo Credit: The Bombay Literary Magazine

Instagram: @aakashbagheera

Disclaimer: This review is only intended for initiating discussions. The opinions and views presented in this article are my own and do not reflect anything about the book's author.

REVIEW

When was the last time a book felt like a train you didn’t plan to board, but once you did, you couldn’t step off? Silk Route by Sachin Kundalkar feels exactly like that. An unending chain of stories, each an epilogue that quietly opens into another. You think you’ve reached the last station, and suddenly, you’re already moving again with another story, another train, the journey of which is slowly becoming into a destination. If the author’s name rings a bell, that’s because he’s the same mind behind Cobalt Blue, yes, the one that became a Netflix film.

Originally written in Marathi as Reshim Marg and translated into English by Aakash Karkare, this first part of the Silk Route is a crisp 110-page read, yet it feels like an entire world in itself. The first thought after finishing this book? I can’t wait for the second part to come out. Sure, there’s a tiny glimpse of what’s next at the end, but that’s not why I’m eager. It's the sheer audacity and tenderness with which Kundalkar writes.

The story follows Nishikant, a queer man navigating love, loss, and desire; his story is tangled with that of Srinivas, his lover. But to reduce this book to a simple love story would be an injustice. Sachin Kundalkar's writing sprawls across lifetimes, histories, and continents, yet somehow makes it feel intimate, like he’s whispering secrets only you’re meant to hear. One moment, you’re inside the invasion of Poland during World War II. The next, you’re in post-war France, watching how the state showered scholarships and cultural privileges create an image of intellectual glory, papering over colonial sins with art and philosophy, pretending to be the moral torchbearer for decades. Then you’re in Delhi, in salons of hollow intellectualism where people congratulated themselves for engaging with each other’s work, even when nothing real came out of it.

And between all this, you’re back to Nishikant. Back to Srinivas. Back to those tender, dangerous edges of love. The book is peppered with motifs that feel like old friends if you’ve read or watched Cobalt Blue. The blue window, for instance, an allegory that appears here too, a silent witness to longing. Yellow flower trees as well, signifying the stirring of puberty, the bloom of desire, all those unspeakable urges taking form in petals and pollen.

Then there’s Nikhil. The same man both Nishikant and his sister love. She’s in a relationship with him. Nishikant carries his crush like a secret flame. And his sister dies because of this affair. The blurb tells you that upfront. It’s how the novel begins with a jolt that pushes you headfirst into the current. And from there, the story never pauses.

This book holds entire lifetimes inside its pages. Deaths, too, many of them are mentioned almost in passing. They don’t all serve the plot, and that’s the beauty of it. They give the story weight and texture, a sense of a world that moves forward even when you’re not looking. And then it hit me. This novel feels like an endless chain of epilogues. Reading it feels like standing on a platform and watching trains pull away and you jump on to reach the remaining last station and complete the journey. You ride along, thinking you’ve reached the end, and suddenly you’re in another story's epilogue and the train is already pulling out. And again. And again.

Yet somehow, it’s not about the pace. It’s about how the author picks up and writes just the right and smallest details of someone's life, tracing their history or that of any country or object, that it feels like it's a complete story and you just let it pass after absorbing it. So the stories keep coming. A boy who refuses to commute by vehicle, walking everywhere, memorising shop names in perfect sequence like a human map. A German man who saves his Polish lover and their child, leaving her actual husband and other children to fend for themselves in a war-torn land. A student making duplicate keys to their crush’s home; not to violate, but to love them the way they wish to be loved, with a language of tenderness and restraint. The details are so sharp, so unassuming, that they pierce you without warning.

And through it all runs a queer world that is mysterious, magical, painfully real, unapologetic, and alive with love, passion, and pure, unfiltered desire. It’s never performative. It simply exists; raw, tender, and gloriously unashamed.

The narrative doesn’t wait for you; it sweeps you along, like a silk thread slipping through your fingers. By the time you finish, you’re not even sure what you’ve read. A novella, a mosaic, an atlas of lives? All I know is that I’m still on that train. And I don’t want it to stop.

Happy Reading!

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