Iron Fists of love

A misunderstood hero with iron fists. A down and out heroine with a knife in her handbag. Both hot headed and both beautiful. One is a boxer who maimed his opponent in a fit of rage, the other has jumped parole and the police are hot on their tracks. Karan meets Sonia at midnight and the two refuse to talk, though they are flat mates. The situation is intriguing and a guaranteed page-turner.

Nidhie Sharma prowls arenas not previously explored in women’s romance fiction — the male preserve of the boxing ring — and she has researched the subject quite easily, down to the footwork that makes a southpaw boxer tough to tackle for his regular right-handed opponents. Her prose is pared and nail-biting, with bits of poetry thrown in for good measure as is the description of the love play between thunder and lightning the night Sonia arrives in Mumbai.

The world that we get to hear most of is Karan’s — he is coveted for his muscles and loved for his good heart, but because he is down on his luck, all he can rely on are illegal mafia run boxing matches, which all too often involve the police. Sharma fleshes Karan’s life and troubled times and his group of loyal friends, all of whom love him and try to help in various confused ways.

Sharma’s descriptions of the sleazy side of Mumbai along with its on-the-surface body grabbing Page Three people are deft and credible. By contrast, Sonia’s secret backstory is tantalisingly kept hidden, revealed only through her troubled nights. The two are a made-for-each-other couple, one soul in two bodies, which makes it harder for them to open up to each other.

Sonia is a poet, who scribbles her thoughts in her notebook, a quality that matches her beautiful face but not her lean mean attitude to life. Like Karan, she has a soft heart which gets her in trouble, though she is far shrewder than he is. She also, daringly for an Indian woman, tosses bottles of Old Monk down her throat in times of stress and packs a knife in her handbag, a knife which she knows how to handle and has no compunction in using. Both she and Karan have issues in anger management and run-ins with abusive relatives.

As a romance Dancing With Demons is, in many senses, a first for its boxing background and for its romantic pair who are so at odds that it seems unlikely that they will ever manage to get together and find true love in a world of lies. Of course, because it is a Harlequin romance, we know that there’s going to be a happy ending, and we aren’t disappointed. The fallen angels fly again and the world is good — even sinister policemen turn out to have hearts of gold. Strongly visual and action packed, it’s hardly surprising that the author plans to make it into a film.

— Anjana Basu is the author of Rhythms of Darkness