It’s been two years since actor- writer Vivaan Shah published his first novel ‘Living Hell’ (2019). Later he came up with a horror short story for the Hindu Businessline titled ‘Entombed’, and one for HT Brunch called ‘The Reptile Kind’.
And now, the 31-year-old has come up with another book, a noir thriller set in Mumbai, ‘Midnight Freeway’.
The actor has been appreciated in movies and shows with literary source material ranging from ‘7 Khoon Maaf’, ‘Bombay Velvet’ to ‘A Suitable Boy’. He has been acting and participating in the theatre since he was a child, and has adapted the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce into a play he directed titled ‘Comedy of Horrors’.
His book is about Yogesh Moolchandani, a disreputable builder, who is dead. All the signs say suicide but there was nothing wrong with his life. He had just cracked a deal and things were looking hale and hearty for him. He had recently even purchased an imported Volkswagen Jetta. CCTV footage from the night of his death shows him crashing into a toll booth at a speed of 180 km per hour on the Bandra-Worli Sea Link. The dealer he had purchased his car from had received five missed calls from him just five minutes prior to the time of the alleged crash.
On the same night, in another part of town, Pranav Paleja, a criminal lawyer who works at the law chamber Mangesh & Mangharam, tries his best to extricate his client-a troublesome drunk-from the clutches of the police. Although an upholder of the law himself, Paleja is pathologically incapable of following it in his day-to-day personal life. Since Pranav Paleja was settling a dispute with the man concerned only moments before the crash, the police land up at his doorstep. As the authorities try to find out why Yogesh was calling his car dealer frantically, the plot begins to thicken. Who, or rather what, killed Yogesh Moolchandani?
