Traipse through parallel universes with Sandhya Ranganathan’s book If Then Else

Author Sandhya Ranganathan’s first work of fiction revolves around the complexities of choice

Ever been plagued by doubt that the road not taken might have had better scenery or more interesting strangers or a pot of gold at its end? In her book If-Then-Else (Vishwakarma Publishing), Sandhya Ranganathan explores the many choices one can take and the avenues that open up as a result, through the life of her protagonist, a recently-retrenched IT employee.

“I’ve wanted to be a writer ever since I was 10 years old; I would write poems and stories even though at that age you don’t really know how to complete a story. And I’ve always wanted to write a book,” says the Bengaluru-based author.

Now as a grown-up with a job in technical communications, Sandhya is still writing and If-Then-Else is not her first book, though it is her first work of fiction.

“In 2016, I put together a little bedtime story for my daughter, titled Mia Finds a Home. There was a graphics designer in my team and we collaborated on this fun project. My second book, Burma to Bangalore is my father’s autobiography which I co-authored.”

She adds, ”My grandfather was in the British Army and my father was born in Burma, but then they had to flee and eventually found their way to Bangalore. It is his story, but my father being an Army man too, wrote it like a military account. I worked on it so everybody could enjoy reading about those times in his life.”

Talking about If-Then-Else, Sandhya says, “I would call it a work of contemporary fiction. When Karthik, a software engineer based in Bangalore gets laid off, there are several choices in front of him. In this book, I use the concept of parallel universes and we see his journey in three different versions of himself. It’s all about the choices we make and their consequences.”

When she started writing the novel, Sandhya said she was actually laid off. “However, I did get back to work and it was during the lockdown that I was able to complete it.”