Book Excerpt: I in the Sky - A Chandigarh Chronicle by Neel Kamal Puri

An exclusive excerpt from I in the Sky – A Chandigarh Chronicle by Neel Kamal Puri (Speaking Tiger, 2026)

Eye in the Sky

Now I am swaddled in clouds, a white sari with untidy pleats and a flowing white pallu, and can look down from my perch at the city below.

This is as much a story about this city, which was executed to a plan, as it is about me. We both were a plan. Neither of us was unplanned growth.

We were twins too, the city and I. An electrically operated curtain revealed the master plan of the city, Chandigarh. A stork brought me, Bubbly. Both at the same time. Both magical. Let us overlook the goings-on that produce cities and humans. Let us not talk about bricks and sperm and the labour that goes into it all. Let us say that the President of the country pressed a button just when my parents summoned a passing stork. And there we were!

We shared a childhood and youth. We both had three caregivers and three claimants to our affections. We were both cute when we were little and not quite so when we grew up. We both battled with modernity in our youth. We both tried to be avant-garde, and we both fell a little short.

After that we went our separate ways.

My sibling continued to be sought after for 3000 years, and I realized how deeply I felt my sense of rejection so early in my life as I ascended to the heavens.

Then my sibling too became an abandoned, ghost city when underground water dried up. The dust of time settled on it, and wild grasses grew over it. They excavated it 6000 years later and could not stop exclaiming at the geometry of the settlement, at the straight lines that must have been roads, and the crumbling structures that seemed like cardboard boxes on either side of them. They were delighted when they came upon the remains of what looked like a giant metal hand but were not quite sure what it must have been used for. They wondered if, in those pagan times, the hand was a stop sign for the destructive ways of god, a totem to ward off that evil eye.

I became an eye in the sky. An eye that is only a voyeur. Sounds like a tautology, but the idea is to reassure you that it has no intention of casting a spell on anyone. It is a bird’s-eye view, which can also be an opinion sometimes.

I now see Beli Ram from here as he stares into my dead face, searching for reasons.

Excerpted with permission from the author and the publisher of I in the Sky – A Chandigarh Chronicle by Neel Kamal Puri (Speaking Tiger, 2026)

About the Book

A brilliantly witty, many-voiced literary novel in which a dead woman looks back on her life—and on the life of Chandigarh, the city born with her—to tell a story of family, memory, displacement and modernity.

Bubbly is dead. Her body has risen to the surface of Sukhna Lake, but from somewhere above Chandigarh, swaddled in cloud and memory, she continues to look down: at the city that was born with her, at the family that made and unmade her, and at the long afterlife of love, ambition, hurt and history.

Born in a canvas tent in the early years of Chandigarh’s making, Bubbly grows up alongside a city imagined as a clean slate—modern, rational, and free of the past. But neither cities nor families are ever built on empty ground, and around her gather Billo and Randy, Barfi Ram and his descendants, protestors and officials, migrants and misfits, the displaced and the dreaming; lives caught in the sweep of nation-building, memory, marriage, gender and inheritance.

Witty, digressive, sharp-eyed and tender, I in the Sky is at once a family chronicle and a ghost story—asking us what survives planning and what resists erasure, and what the dead can see that the living cannot. More than anything else, it’s an irreverent biography of Chandigarh itself.

About the Author

Neel Kamal Puri was born in Ludhiana, Punjab. She taught English literature and media studies at Chandigarh’s Post Graduate Government College for Girls. Her previous works include The Patiala Quartet and Remember to Forget.