Sulakshana Sen 
Stream of Life 

When a young boy living in India loses his father to an early heart attack, his world is thrown into disarray. Manoj, just barely old enough to understand what happened to his father, struggles through his early years as he tries to come to peace with a life without a father. Worse, his mother is seeing another man that he doesn’t approve of. When bad timing and carelessness combine to cause Manoj to see his mother and her lover in a compromising position, the now-teenage boy assaults his mother’s boyfriend without thinking. With the psychological fallout from the trial burning in the background, readers journey through the formative years of Manoj’s life, examining the way karma and psychology tie together to form a web of experiences that make up a life. As Manoj grows and develops relationships with an ever-widening circle of family and friends, the small resonances that guide our stories are interrogated. And in Manoj’s never-ending quest for love and connection, the very idea of contentment comes into question. In Stream of Life, all of us are connected, and the ways that we are connected are never as we imagine. With strong characterizations and a dose of humor, the author brings us closer to understanding the feeling of a life lived.