Tara is a modern-day princess who has everything except the one thing that matters: love. That line could be the teaser for Nelofar Currimbhoy’s Tara: The Dream Chaser, but this isn’t your palace-and-pearls saga. Don’t expect turrets, chandeliers, or silks. Expect the sting of loneliness, the bruises of betrayal, and the relentless hunt for freedom. Tara is Rajput royalty, but her gilded world is just that — gilded. Scratch the surface and you find an emptiness so deep it feels like quicksand.
The Paradox of Plenty
The opening pages pose the question: how can someone born with every privilege be starved of affection? That’s exactly what Nelofar’s heroine embodies — the paradox of plenty. Tara’s father is emotionally absent, and her mother controlling to the point of suffocation. Neglect and manipulation form a cocktail that could ruin anyone. Tara’s only crime is daring to want something different. She dares to want love.
Mumbai: The City of Second Chances
She marries young because that’s what good girls from good families do. Except the marriage is loveless, her husband more shadow than partner. So she bolts. And here begins the story proper — Tara’s escape to Mumbai, the city that promises reinvention to anyone brave enough to try.
Mumbai doesn’t hand out second chances easily. It tests, tempts, and then, slowly, lets you in. For Tara, it offers Kabir — half-Bengali, half-French — a photographer who sees through the armour she has spent years polishing. With him, she learns to breathe again.
Kabir or Vivan? Healing or Burning?
It could have ended there: healing, romance, a gentle fade into happily-ever-after. But Nelofar isn’t writing Mills & Boon. She’s writing life. And life rarely offers one love story neatly tied with a ribbon.
Enter Vivan Mehta, Bollywood’s golden boy — dazzling, magnetic, irresistible. He is everything Kabir is not: unpredictable, intoxicating, a risk you know you shouldn’t take but still do. With Vivan, Tara isn’t healing; she’s burning. And sometimes burning feels better than breathing.
Flawed. Restless. Real.
What makes this novel more than a tale of two men and one woman is Tara herself. She’s not waiting to be saved, though she often stumbles. She’s not flawless — far from it. Vulnerable, restless, maddening in her indecision, she is also utterly believable. Tara is every woman who has tried to shed the skin of expectation and dared to chase something truer.
A Midnight Confession in Print
What struck me most was the texture Nelofar gives her narrative. The prose is elegant yet intimate, cinematic yet personal. Reading Tara feels like sitting across from a friend at midnight as she spills secrets you didn’t know she carried but instantly recognize. There’s ache in the telling, but also defiance.
Between Duty and Desire
The themes are universal. Who hasn’t felt the pull between duty and desire? Who hasn’t wrestled with ghosts of the past while trying to claim a future? Tara’s struggles — escaping an oppressive marriage, navigating new loves, surviving her mother’s manipulations — raise larger questions: How much of our life do we owe to others? When does self-preservation become selfishness? Can freedom and love truly coexist?
The Currimbhoy Signature
Currimbhoy doesn’t offer easy answers. She offers the messiness of being human, wrapped in language that seduces line by line. Her characters are flawed but alive, her situations heightened yet plausible. Yes, there’s glamour — the star allure of Vivan, the seductive pulse of Mumbai — but beneath the glitter lies grit.
By the last page, I realized this wasn’t just Tara’s journey. It was also a mirror. If you’ve ever rewritten your own story, if you’ve ever chosen yourself over the script handed to you, you’ll find a bit of Tara in you.
From Flame to Fiction
Nelofar Currimbhoy has a storytelling pedigree. She’s the daughter of the formidable Shahnaz Husain, and her earlier books — Flame, Eyes of the Healer — already showed her gift for weaving the personal with the poetic. In Tara, she moves beyond biography and spiritual musings into the raw, beating heart of fiction. The result is compulsively readable and emotionally resonant.
Not a Fairy Tale, But Something Braver
Yes, there is a cinematic quality. It wouldn’t surprise me if Tara makes it to the screen someday. But even without that, the novel succeeds in what every good book should do: it makes you feel. It lingers. It whispers long after it ends.
Tara: The Dream Chaser is not a fairy tale. It’s more dangerous and more rewarding. It’s about resilience, desire, and the audacity to start over. Read it not for palace intrigue or Bollywood glamour, but for the storm quietly raging in a woman who refuses to be defined by her past.
Unforgettable, messy, honest, Tara is an experience, not just a novel.
Book: Tara: The Dream Chaser by Nelofar Currimbhoy
Published by: Rupa
Price: Rs 395
(Ashutosh Kumar Thakur is a Bengaluru-based management professional and columnist.)
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