In the sacred city of Varanasi, where the dead are carried to the river every single morning, one man does the arithmetic of staying alive. Arun is thirty-one. He has driven Bus Number 13, the vehicle that carries the dead toward their final farewells on the burning ghat. since before the city wakes. He knows the river not as something sacred, but as where the work is: which vendors will let him carry their loads, where the current pulls hard enough to drown a careless man, and exactly how many rupees separate his family from collapse. Then Charlotte arrives from Edinburgh, paying for a morning of transcendence on the same stone steps where Arun has spent his life. She raises her camera and captures what she’ll caption “stillness.” She has no way of knowing she has photographed a man doing arithmetic rice, a child’s shoes, a debt with no paperwork and no mercy. “Neither of them is cruel. That is precisely the point,” from the author’s Introduction Bus Number 13 is a literary novel about the invisible economies people share without ever truly seeing each other Arun’s mounting debt to a moneylender named Suresh, a sister whose fever will not break, and a boy who collapses in the market dust asking for only one thing: water. Set against the ancient rhythm of Varanasi’s ghats marigold sellers, temple bells, pilgrims and labourers moving through the same sacred water for entirely different reasons this is a story about survival, faith, and what it means to be alive when death is your daily cargo. Perfect for readers who love:
Literary fiction set in India, rich with place and atmosphere
Character-driven stories about class, poverty, and quiet dignity
Novels that sit with mortality and meaning without offering easy redemption
Stories in the spirit of Varanasi’s ghats sacred, unflinching, and alive
Sarita S Chauhan is an educationist, author, and visual artist whose previous works have been recognized by the Gem’s World of Book Records and the India Book of Records. She is also the founder of #writeupyoursoul, an initiative encouraging people to write from the soul. How will you live before your own last stop?