Fiction
Twin Flame
by Nish Amarnath
TWIN FLAME is an inter-racial love story with literary overtones, multicultural stripes and strands of magical realism. A South Asian Math prodigy’s wish for a boy in a painting to come alive materializes in the form of an Austrian-Jewish writer. But a troubling secret wrenches them apart, forcing them to confront their worst fears, if life is to give them one final chance. Sherry Kasal, diagnosed with type-1 diabetes at the age of five, hopes to draw upon her passion for Math to discover a cure for conditions like her own. She stumbles upon a painting of a boy trapped in a snowstorm. She talks to the boy in this picture whenever she's sad, frustrated, angry and/or dejected. When writer Shaddy Haas enters her life, Sherry is motivated to resume work on a concentric model of electromagnetism that she had abandoned as a teen. Alas, circumstances wrench Sherry and Shaddy apart. Sherry, who reluctantly marries a lawyer, lands in Manhattan, where she scrambles to pick up the vestiges of her shelved research dream and realizes that she’s living a lie. Sherry must also unravel a flabbergasting secret that links Shaddy to the painting of the boy in the snowstorm as they try to find their way back to each other. Twin Flame, whose narrative is embedded with the alternating voices of its protagonists in both first-person and third-person points of view, combines the mystical ethos of Elif Shafak's 'Forty Rules of Love' with the futuristic cadence of Erich Segal's 'Prizes' and the exotic romanticism of Jan-Philipp Sendker's 'The Art of Hearing Heartbeats.'
