VMPL
New Delhi [India], October 30: Durga in Nigeria is a literary novel that arrives with the quiet force of a prayer whispered rather than sung. Written by Piyush Mahiskey, it is a story that resists spectacle and honors silence, exploring displacement, intimacy, and myth-making with emotional precision. At its center stands Saanidhya Ashtankar, or Saani–a disciplined product strategist from Pune who travels to Lagos, Nigeria, on a professional assignment and finds herself caught between rationality and revelation. What begins as a journey of work turns into a journey of transformation, where an unexpected near-death experience gives rise to a myth, turning Saani into a figure of divine reverence across India. Yet the novel refuses the miraculous. It insists on emotional truth, on inevitability, on how myths are born not from gods but from grief.
The narrative unfolds over twenty-three chapters, opening with Anant Joshi’s relocation from Pune to Lagos, leaving behind his wife Roshni and their son Kush. In the humid air of a foreign city, Anant’s relationship with Saani deepens–from professional collaboration to a sacred companionship that neither names nor defines itself. Through the cracks of this connection, Mahiskey examines the fault lines of love, longing, and moral restraint. Back home, Roshni’s quiet faith becomes its own act of endurance; her prayers are not for miracles, but for meaning. Kush, their son, becomes a silent witness to the shifting geographies of affection, symbolizing innocence caught in the tides of devotion and distance. When Anant’s heart literally breaks–manifested as broken heart syndrome–the novel collapses the boundary between physical and spiritual suffering, showing how emotion inhabits the body as much as belief inhabits the mind.
As the story progresses, the emotional pulse of the novel aligns with the festival of Navratri, through a section called Nine Days of Battle. These nine days mirror Saani’s own internal war between logic and surrender, between self-definition and dissolution. What begins as personal unraveling turns into public myth. Whispers of her survival in Lagos, of her composure amidst chaos, turn into a legend of divine intervention. Saani becomes Durga, not as a goddess of temples but as an embodiment of resilience–an accidental deity born from trauma, silence, and projection. The transformation is both mystical and mundane, captured with restraint rather than drama. By the time the final chapter, Godwoman, arrives, Saani’s silence itself becomes scripture–a wordless testimony to endurance.
Lagos, in Mahiskey’s hands, is not an exotic setting but a state of being. It is rendered as emotional topography–a city of contrasts that mirrors Saani’s inner weather. Its humidity, chaos, and noise are countered by her introspective calm. Lagos becomes the vessel through which questions of belonging, faith, and cultural inheritance find new resonance. Mahiskey’s portrayal of place is remarkably devoid of cliches; he treats geography as psychology, mapping how landscapes shape emotion and how migration alters memory. His prose does not describe so much as it reveals. The language is sparse yet luminous, blending the logic of a technologist with the cadence of a poet. Through metaphors drawn from data, algorithms, and systems, he gives shape to the emotional architecture of human experience.
What makes Durga in Nigeria extraordinary is its refusal to explain. It trusts its readers to inhabit ambiguity, to find meaning in silence. The novel interrogates how trauma becomes commodified, how faith crosses borders, and how societies create gods out of survivors. Its questions are not answered but felt. Relationships unfold through gestures rather than declarations; a look, a half-finished sentence, or a remembered ritual holds more power than dialogue. Every page carries the echo of restraint. Mahiskey writes not to impress but to listen–to his characters, to his readers, and to the spaces between their thoughts.
Behind this subtle yet profound work is Piyush Mahiskey, a novelist and Technology Architect based in Nagpur, India. A graduate of S.F.S. High School, YCCE College (B.E. in Electrical Engineering), and BITS Pilani (M.Tech. in Software Systems), he blends the structural clarity of engineering with the emotional resonance of literature. His professional life at Infosys, where he leads digital transformation projects, informs the meticulous architecture of his storytelling. But beyond code and systems lies a writer deeply rooted in culture, memory, and emotional truth. His creative process is iterative, reflective, and exacting–driven by the belief that fiction must earn its revelations.
Mahiskey’s connection to Nagpur and its cultural fabric runs deep. Festivals like Pola, Marbat, and Navratri influence his imagination not as background celebrations but as metaphors of catharsis, continuity, and transformation. His writing emerges from this intersection–where technology meets tradition, where silence becomes ritual, and where the sacred finds form in the secular. Durga in Nigeria thus becomes more than a story; it is an act of emotional cartography–a mapping of how devotion survives in the modern mind.
As a debut, the novel establishes Mahiskey as a distinctive voice in Indian literary fiction–measured, introspective, and quietly defiant. He writes without ornament, avoiding melodrama or spectacle. His characters are not heroes or victims but seekers–ordinary people caught in extraordinary tides of faith and feeling. Through them, he poses timeless questions: What does it mean to believe? How does silence heal? Can myth be both a wound and a refuge? His answers are not declared–they are discovered, often in the pauses between sentences.
Durga in Nigeria is a meditation on what remains after the noise of devotion fades. It reminds readers that faith need not be loud to be transformative, that gods can be born in boardrooms as much as in temples, and that the deepest truths often arrive without words. Piyush Mahiskey’s debut novel does not simply tell a story; it builds an experience–layered, lyrical, and quietly unforgettable. The book has been published by Astitva Prakashan, India’s leading publishing house. Rooted in Marathi nuance yet universal in its reach, it stands as a testament to the power of silence, the sanctity of restraint, and the eternal search for meaning that connects us all.
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