In 2018, a short news report caught Rupinder Brar’s attention. A group of fishermen had been injured, one of them fatally, and the cause was blast fishing, a practice she had never come across before. That stray item, she told guests at the Prime Minister’s Museum and Library in Teen Murti Bhawan on 25 September, became the seed of her debut novel, Corals Bloom Again.
Published by Konark Publishers, the eco-thriller follows Maya, an Indian woman who travels to the East African coast to claim an inheritance and is drawn into a fight over a buried truth. Brar is a 1990-batch Indian Revenue Service officer, now Additional Secretary in the Ministry of Coal and formerly Additional Director General in the Ministry of Tourism. The book was released by Justice Gyan Sudha Misra, former judge of the Supreme Court of India. She confessed that she had deliberately not asked for an advance copy: as the one releasing the book, she said, she had no wish to give away its secrets.
A Seven-Year Journey From Tanzania To The Page
Justice Misra praised Brar for keeping her literary life alive through a demanding career, admitting that her own had faded after college. Brar spent her teenage years in Tanzania and left in the 1980s, but the place never left her. The blast fishing report gave her a way back to those impressionable years. She wanted to present a vital subject in a form people could enjoy after a long day, when most of us would rather scroll.
The book took more than seven years, with long gaps, before she committed to it seriously in 2023. She wrote on her laptop in whatever time she could find, following an established author’s advice to let the characters live in her head. By the end, she joked that she would come home after dinner wondering where she had left one of them. Her first round with an editor was humbling, with corrections on nearly every page.
Letters That Carry A Shared Struggle
Brar shared a passage built around a letter written to Maya by an old friend of her grandmother, Bhavna. Set against the anti-colonial movements of the 1930s and 1940s, it recalls how an Indian family on a plantation joined the local fight for freedom. In one episode, a group of young men are detained by a police patrol, and Bhavna’s father, a doctor employed by the British, arrives at the lock-up with his medicine box.
The part closest to her heart describes Bhavna leaving for India on a steamer on 20 February 1947. The letter-writer recalls her fingers slipping from his on the gangway, and the certainty that they would never meet again.
What Does It Mean To Inherit A Damaged Paradise?
For award-winning author Pratyaksha, inheritance sits at the heart of the novel as firmly as its environmental crisis. Maya inherits more than an estate: she inherits memory, history and a shared legacy of the freedom struggle. Along with the benefits of a system, Pratyaksha argued, come the damage it has done, and the book’s moral force lies in Maya’s refusal to look away. The success of a book, she added, lies in how many windows it opens; she herself went straight to searching online about blast fishing.
Pratyaksha also dismissed the old charge that women write only soft, emotional stories, saying that time has passed. Women, she argued, are especially good at building a bridge between their inner worlds and the world outside. The moderator, Chinki Sinha, former editor of Outlook, called it a book about friendship, women, geography, climate change and eco-feminism. For her own review, she borrowed Agha Shahid Ali’s phrase “separation’s geography”, and she described Sita, who came from the land and returned to it, as an eco-feminist figure.
Ancestral Forests, Shared Futures
Sinha quoted the Jharkhand poet Jacinta Kerketta, whose villagers answer outsiders asking to see their god by pointing to the mountains and forests. She also noted a similar spiritual world in the work of Ben Okri. Winnie Mwanjala, Minister at the Kenya High Commission in New Delhi and a veteran of international climate negotiations, took up the thread. She recalled sacred forests once guarded by her ancestors, many cut down in the name of development, and centuries of spice trade between Kenya’s coast and India.
Mwanjala insisted that women must sit at the table on the blue economy as partners, not victims. Coastal women, she said, want fresh fish and clean beaches, and live with the sea’s decline every day. A tree has life, she told the audience, and cutting one destroys our continuation.
Conservation Begins In The Kitchen
Asked by Sinha about the kitchen as a political space, celebrity chef Ranveer Brar, the only man on the panel, said he stood there represented by the women of his family. His mother, he recalled, always saved the night’s leftovers for the next day’s breakfast. For him, the key word in the title was “again”, because it carries hope. Conservation, he suggested, means looking back as much as forward, and handing older practices to the next generation in a language it understands.
The Science Behind The Title
Amrit Kaur Puri explained the title in biological terms. Corals are colonies of tiny polyps living in partnership with algae, which give them colour and food, while fluorescent proteins add their vivid glow. Blast fishing sends pressure waves through the water that rupture fish’s swim bladders and shatter reefs. Rising heat and acidification drive the algae out and leave the corals bleached white.
Bleached, Puri stressed, is not the same as dead. Researchers in India and abroad are working with corals that can tolerate warmer seas, and she ended by pointing to Lakshadweep, an archipelago of 36 islands built entirely of coral.
A Launch Among Old Friends
The audience at Teen Murti was drawn from every chapter of Brar’s life. Friends from her nursery and college days sat alongside colleagues from the tax service and the tourism ministry, and she thanked each group in turn as the evening opened. A representative of Konark Publishers spoke about the risks of publishing at a time of turmoil in the industry, arguing that books in step with their times are what publishers now back. The panel then took two questions from the floor before the formal session drew to a close.
Brar’s parting words were an appeal, not a flourish. Calling herself “a very young author” in need of support, she urged everyone to take a copy home and write a review. Then she turned to signing books for friends who had known her long before she became a novelist.