A colourful read

Timeri’s tale has all the ingredients to make it a masala read — courage, cunning, conspiracy and cupid. And his characters are mostly well etched out. Rukhsana, as the embodiment of enterprise and the engineer of the team’s escape, is portrayed as a woman of sense and substance. She presents the personification of two parallel lives, the character in which two contrary worlds — her freedom-filled life in India and the burkha-imprisoned existence of Afghanistan — converge.

But as all the main characters race towards a climax on the cricket ground, this tale of political guile and gimmickry in the garb of cricket diplomacy proves that even as far as penning prose goes, it’s all in the game.