My Illegitimate Son: A True Story | Sanjay Jha

Relationships are achingly complex, even more so when it’s a father and his accidental love child.

Two strangers meet serendipitously. One is an irrepressible, mischievous brat and the other a brooding platitudinous bore. Their contrasting individual paths that portend a star-crossed disaster suddenly find a shared future. Fate brings them under the same roof, and soon, the insolent child’s wild, roller-coaster, mind-numbing life takes centre stage in a moody family’s wacky, dysfunctional abode. What follows is a fantastical journey, and that is putting it mildly.

Enter an unexpected visitor, and soon their lives are completely disarranged. The vicissitudes of life are on full display as the father-son duo confront a new reality. The family struggles to grapple with the new power dynamic as circumstances start spiralling beyond everyone’s control, with grievous consequences.

In this exceptional slice-of-life book, Sanjay Jha tells us a heart-rending account of love and loss, happiness and grief, regret and redemption. ‘Grief, once it checks in, is a permanent guest’, says the tiny protagonist. Is atonement and forgiveness at all possible, or is it just a desperate human urge for finding inner peace? Is time, eventually, the only true healer? Can we really move on?

In My Illegitimate Son, Sanjay Jha narrates a stirringly poignant story, which has both riotous laughter and abundant sorrow, that might just find an echo with your own.