L Lucknowite Sapan’s second fiction out on stand

Set in his hometown, the dark love story travels to Germany and US, says the techie-turned writer

ucknow’s Sapan Saxena, a software engineer working in New Hampshire, USA, has come out with his second book, ‘Unns: The Captivation’.

The fiction is set in his hometown and travels to Germany and the US. “The love story is in three stages. It starts from Lucknow and finds a mention of a school, which I have not named, and Residency,” he tells HT City on a phone from his workplace.

Sapan has done his schooling from Cathedral and St Francis College. Later, he did his engineering from MNNIT, Allahabad.

Unns is second stage of love according to Sufi tradition, tells the author and adds, “Sufism has seven stages of love — dilakshi (attraction), unns, mohabat (love), akidat (trust), ibadat (worship), junoon (madness) and maut (death). All the three setups of my story explore these stages. It’s a dark love story.” The story finds inspiration from some stories of that the author witnessed during his education days.

But, it’s certainly not his love story.

“It has some experiences from real life but it’s certainly not my own. It is the story Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) agent Atharva Rathod and Meher Qasim and their unpredictable relationship. Unns is a story of love beyond any terms and conditions.”

Talking about his writing style, he says, “Any story has to be built upon a very basic and pure human emotion. If this is about love, I brought in the purest of emotions with the seven stages of love, and then added thrill into it.”

Sapan started writing when he was coding for a complex algorithm. “I have a love for decoding the tangled web of emotions. That is how my everlasting love for words began and I wrote my first book Finders, Keepers which is also a fiction.”

The author has his parental home in Gomti Nagar and his wife too belongs to Lucknow. “I was in India last year and plan to come again later this year. My father released the book on March 14 in Chandigrah. The book is currently available on Amazon and in prominent book stores. It has been published by Inspire India.”

A self-confessed Shah Rukh Khan admirer, he prepared a Jabra Fan song video, before the release of Bollywood icon’s movie Fan, which the superstar tweeted on his official handle.