Mumbai, 2018
You are an anomaly in the oldest strands of fates.
What you dream are the memories of someone else’s life, stitched to your own.
Pull one thread, and centuries move.
Sachiel was once a rising star of Mumbai’s underground music scene. Now, he runs a small bistro, raises two adopted twins in a housing society, and keeps his past exactly where he left it. When Daniel, his former agent, reaches out for one last request, a performance on the opening night of a jazz club by the Arabian Sea, Sachiel accepts. What follows is a reckoning, written long before Sachiel was even born.
Across time, the boundaries between lives and deaths begin to bleed. A boy crosses into a realm he was never meant to enter. A German merchant ship burns off the Goan coast. A cartoonist’s clock runs backwards in an arthouse film that shouldn’t exist. A scimitar stirs its sentience after waiting for generations. A clandestine cult begins orchestrating its most violent ritual in two hundred years. A drug dealer and his dog are drawn into something far larger than a delivery. And somewhere above the dark December waves, a nightjar flies and feasts on insects, watching the saga unfold.
In his sophomore novel, Pratik Shah establishes himself as one of the most original and fearless voices in contemporary fiction. Tender and devastating, darkly funny and genuinely terrifying, Blackbowl is a composition about the weight of other people’s lives inside your own; about what gets inherited, what gets lost, and what has quietly been following you all along.
Pratik Shah (b. 12 September 1999) is an author and screenwriter who began in theatre as a child actor at IPTA Balmanch, a wing founded by Kaifi Azmi, before transitioning to production design, writing, and direction. In 2015 and 2016, his fiction gained international traction on social reading platforms, and his short stories, published in local magazines, were acclaimed for their gritty, layered narratives. Across 2018-2019, Shah performed spoken poetry across clubs, stages, and festivals. His psychological-horror short Psyche, released on Amazon Kindle in 2019, peaked at #2 on the global charts in its category. Over the years, he worked independently as a copywriter and editor after a stint at Ogilvy, and was part of the direction team for Netflix’s Skater Girl (2021).
Shah holds a Master’s from MICA, Ahmedabad, where he also served as Director of Sankalp, the theatre society. He later worked as an executive producer at Viacom18 and JioHotstar, and is the founder and creative director of 33 Womb, a boutique studio. He is currently associated with dreamachine, an animation-led IP studio based in Mumbai.
Shah’s debut novel, Wildflowers in the Dark, and poetry collection, Halfway to the Moon (Selected Poetry from 2016 - 2020), were published in 2025. Blackbowl is his sophomore novel.
