My parents sometimes call me modern. They do this when they want to make fun of me. Most recently they called me modern when I told them that my girlfriend, her ex and I are co-parenting the two cats they have together, so that the cats spend half the year at our place and half at the ex’s. “Modern relationships.” The fact that they can joke about this stuff makes them “modern parents”. There’s also “modern jobs”, “modern clothes”, “modern girls”, and “modern generation”.

Modern India is a combination of many such things and also things less wholesome than feline living arrangements – such as a failing democracy and growing social tensions. To be honest, the exact composition changes depending on the place, the people and the mood. The same goes for books about the country – which, at least to me, seem to have become more varied, though surely not enough.A year ago I wrote my novel Teen Couple Have Fun Outdoors, in which a family struggles with the aftermath of a secretly filmed sex video featuring the eldest son and his girlfriend. Most of the characters are trying to figure out the boundaries in modern India – who thinks what, what’s acceptable, what’s a big deal and what’s not. 

In this list, I’ve tried to talk about other books on modern India – though there’s plenty I must have overlooked because of gaps in my reading, the size of the country and my questionable taste.

1. A State of Freedom by Neel MukherjeeNeel Mukherjee’s third novel is so rare and brilliant as it paints a big picture of the country without losing any of the bristling, painful detail. Five interconnected stories talk about – among other things – class, poverty, migration and ambition, through characters facing vastly different circumstances: from an NRI man and his son to a vagrant and his bear. I still remember reading this for the first time and being stunned by the breadth of empathy and beauty that Mukherjee uncovers even in the most brutal moments.

2. When I hit you by Meena Kandasamy
Our narrator is trapped in a terrifying marriage. To the outside world, her husband is a university professor and an intellectual communist. At home he’s a dictator – physically and mentally torturing his new wife in the name of re-education. But the narrator is determined not to break, even as she is battered. What we get is what the subtitle – Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife – promises: a fiercely gripping portrait of herself, marriage, abuse and male ego told in the most clinical, acerbic and relentless voice. 

3. The Machine Is Learning by Tanuj Solanki
Solanki’s second novel is narrated by a sharp upper-management insurance employee named Saransh. Saransh hails from small-town Uttar Pradesh. Having had to work hard on his way to a top job, he’s very much a company man – that is, until he’s put in charge of an AI project which will make whole departments redundant and many unemployed.