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Every novel begins with an obsession rather than an idea. For author Pratik Shah, the seed for Blackbowl, his sophomore novel, began with a character.
One afternoon in the summer of 2021, while listening to David Bowie’s Blackstar and gazing at the blue sky, Shah began wondering about a woman with no faith or belonging, forming a structure of internalised, disillusioned meanings to create her own religion, one that could make sense of her fractured life. As it was with Wildflowers In The Dark, his first novel, Blackbowl’s flow began with the design of a female character. Shah now calls this archetype the “Mother” in his process. While in Wildflowers In The Dark, that anchoring emotional gravity eventually created Faizah Singh, in Blackbowl, it gave birth to Karyna Schäfer.
Shah’s storytelling has been shaped by his work across theatre, filmmaking, advertising, and publishing. Rather than allowing these mediums to operate in isolation, he sees them as a continual process of cross-pollination. Theatre gave him a strong foundation in making audiences feel emotions through performance and human dynamics. Advertising taught him the economy of language, making every word and strategic direction count. Films and OTT shows sharpened his instincts for story beats and the pacing required to sustain attention.
Writing novels, however, gives Shah the freedom to synthesise his vision and craft on an expansive canvas unconstrained by runtime, budget, or production logistics. To him, literature is the most liberating and fulfilling medium for expression; it is the one he feels most at home in.
At its heart, Blackbowl goes beyond its cult, horror, and surreal elements. As its blurb puts it, “Blackbowl is a composition about the weight of other people’s lives inside your own; about what gets inherited, what gets lost, and what has been quietly following you all along.”
The novel is ultimately a tragedy about the inheritances people unknowingly carry: beliefs they never chose, grief they never experienced firsthand, wounds that refuse to become scars, and expectations they grew into. Blackbowl asks whether anyone can ever truly separate themselves from these inheritances, or whether they simply learn to carry them differently.
The novel’s blend of magical realism, psychological horror, music, dreamscapes, and literary fiction was not the result of a conscious attempt to challenge conventional boundaries. Everything aligned itself without premeditation or structure. Shah continued to write what engaged him most at every new page, allowing the story to determine its own rhythm.
For Shah, genres and conventional labels are useful maps when it comes to marketing, but while writing, they are simply instruments and textures rather than overarching, limiting definitions. If the emotional and narrative truth of a story demands a certain treatment, he believes in following it without interrupting the rhythm by imposing a boundary.
Music, similarly, is not a deliberate device in Blackbowl. It is simply how Shah thinks and processes, naturally seeping into his expression. The epigraphs that appear at the start of each chapter as excerpts from songs—ranging from Pink Floyd and The Strokes to Frank Ocean and Elliott Smith—serve as atmospheric markers. They also announce the emotional frequency Shah was in while writing each segment.
The intention is to tune the reader in, like playing notes to register the key of what is to follow.
Within the narrative, music carries weight through ambiance, context, and revelation. Whether Sachiel listens to Tchaikovsky or Casiopea in solitude, Mr. Meshram indulges in Snarky Puppy as part of his morning routine, Kashif ji discovers the blues in a vinyl collection, or Daniel and Anita hum a classic by The Smiths or play Hindi hits from the 2000s on 9XM in the background, music remains an essential part of the world of Blackbowl.
In that sense, music in the novel reflects what it is in Shah’s own life: meaning and magic that holds everything language alone cannot.
The locations in Blackbowl are equally important. Shah does not treat places as static backdrops. To him, they are alive with historical memories, distinct personalities, and personal significance. The cooperative housing society’s compound in Mumbai, the tobacco estate in Gujarat, the clock repair shop in Vasco da Gama, and the underground jazz club by the Arabian Sea all participate on the same canvas as the characters and the story.
They inevitably add their own flavour to the narrative’s experience and identity.
Belief, memory, trauma, and fate also find themselves woven into the novel through an occult lens. Blackbowl contains several personal subtexts that Shah chooses to keep to himself, for now. Beyond those, three core directions shaped the novel.
The first was the desire for Blackbowl to feel like a puzzle that answers itself in layers. The second involved the concepts of schadenfreude—the experience of deriving pleasure from the suffering of others—and folie à deux, the shared delusion of two or more people, which became two critical plot principles.
The third direction was loosely inspired by the Zoroastrian Towers of Silence, featuring concentric sloping circles at the structure’s top for the decomposing bodies of men, women, and then children. Shah wanted the story’s flow to become increasingly turbulent and progressively disturbing with every passing chapter, until the narration could finally drop the reader into the darkest pit, leading to a cathartic finale.
He wanted the act of reading Blackbowl to feel like a ritual in itself.
When it comes to literary influences, Shah admits that the list is extensive across mediums. Yet, if pressed to choose one name that influenced him in literature, it would undoubtedly be Haruki Murakami.
In the summer of 2017, Shah read Kafka on the Shore within two days, reading so feverishly that he blurred the sense of what was fiction and what was real around him. Murakami showed him how the surreal and the mundane could coexist, grounded in slice-of-life subjectivity.
While that feeling has been deeply absorbed into Shah’s craft, influence, to him, never amounts to imitation. Instead, it is more like permission to trust state-of-flow intuition over templates. Eventually, these influences collide and converse with his own perspectives, carving out a sensibility he believes is distinctly his own.
Blackbowl is perhaps best suited to a reader defined not by demographics, but by disposition. It is for someone who appreciates slow-burn psychological horror enough to understand the play at the margins and surrender to an explosive climax. Someone comfortable with unevenly resolved tragedies. Someone who holds grief in the same register as comedy.
It is also for someone who loves Mumbai, the city of dreams and nightmares, and the infinities of music. And perhaps, most importantly, for someone who has felt at some point that they are carrying a predestined weight that does not belong to them, but has not yet found the words for it.
As for what readers should carry with them after the final page, Shah leaves that open.
He believes expectations are unfair to both the book and the reader. Once a book enters the world, it survives as different experiences in different minds. Having done an honest duty that he feels at peace with, Shah sees Blackbowl as no longer being solely his.
And for him, that is a beautiful feeling.