For someone whose first novel The Other Garden dealt with a broken home, heartbreak and personal loss, clearly Chabria has moved out of her comfort zone to write this ambitious novel. Generation 14 is an intense, yet engaging story of a fourteenth generation clone who carefully guards a secret that could threaten her very existence: her memory. As a citizen in a futuristic India, the clone sidesteps her controlled existence as her brain traces her memory back to an ancient and lost civilization, of an India of the past.

Dredged up from Chabria’s vivid and rather disturbing dreams, of “a severed hand and a submerged temple spire” Generation 14 crosses genres and includes visitations from a lesbian gecko, a pompous fish and feral wolf. When the book was launched at India Habitat Centre, one such lusty period from the chapter, The Sentence was brought alive with a febrile intensity by eminent theatre personality Suneet Tandon. And Chabria’s younger sister Malavika Sarukkai, a renowned Bharatnatyam dancer emoted the unrequited love of a parrot for her mistress in a 12-minute performance from the chapter The Recovery Pad.

It took Chabria nine long years to complete this book. She did extensive research on the cultural history of the country along with folk tales like Panchatantra. “There is a world of knowledge in the past and I wanted to tie up my protagonist’s experiences with the memory of a time gone by,” says Chabria.