I Was Gone for Three Years. My Book Took Ten. Here’s What I Came Back With.

If you’ve been here before — hello again. I’ve missed this space more than I let myself admit.

If you’re new here — welcome. My name is Terveen Gill. I’m an author, graphic novel script writer, and indie filmmaker based in Bengaluru, India. And I am back, after nearly three years away, with something I have been carrying for a very long time.

My debut psychological thriller novel, Cobra Orchard, is now available on Amazon Kindle.

I want to tell you what that sentence cost me — and what it gave back to me.

Ten Years in the Making

Ten years. That is how long it took to write this book. Not ten years of writing every day, sitting at a neat desk with a cup of coffee and a clear outline. Ten years of living with these characters. Of setting the story down and picking it up again. Of watching the people inside it grow older in my mind, more complex, more real, until I could no longer pretend they were just fiction.

Gunvati, Deepshikha, and Laadwinder became my second family. I grew with them and they stand by me till this day.

This is not something you can explain to someone who hasn’t written a book. But if you have ever loved a story so deeply that the characters felt like they lived alongside you — you will understand. Through them, I found myself navigating my own griefs. Writing their pain gave me a language for mine. Leading them through their darkest moments, I found my way through some of my own.

This book taught me perseverance in a way nothing else has. It taught me that hard work is never wasted — even when the results are slow, even when the road disappears entirely for a while. You keep going. You trust the story. You trust yourself.

Cobra Orchard is proof that both can be trusted.

What Is This Book About?

It is a dark, immersive psychological thriller set across two timelines — the 1970s and the early 2000s — in the villages of rural India. It follows three women whose fates are bound by a sinister guru’s prophecy, by secrets buried deep enough to rot, and by a man in a kaftan who has been watching them far longer than any of them know.

It is a book about motherhood and what love looks like when it goes wrong. About siblings and the wounds that only family can inflict. About cursed fates — literal and metaphorical — and whether acceptance is surrender or the bravest thing a person can do. About the particular darkness that lives inside ordinary lives, in ordinary villages, behind ordinary doors.

It is told through multiple voices and an unreliable narrator. It does not offer easy comfort. But it offers truth — and sometimes, that is the most valuable thing.

Some secrets don’t stay buried. They rot — and everything above them rots too. The cobra doesn’t warn before it strikes.

A Word About Coming Back

Three years is a long time to be away from a space you built with your own words. Life demanded things of me that I am not ready to write about yet. But I will say this — the silence was not empty. It was full of this book, and everything it took to finally bring it into the world.

I am a Times of India and Chandigarh Literary Society award-winning short story writer. I have scripted graphic novels, directed short films, trained people in the craft of language. But this — a debut novel, ten years in the making, published and live on Amazon Kindle — this is the thing I am most proud of.

I hope you’ll read it. I hope it unsettles you a little. I hope it stays with you long after you close it.

That is all any story can ask for.

Cobra Orchard is available now on Amazon Kindle. If you read it, I would be deeply grateful for a review — honest ones are the ones that mean the most.

And if you’ve been here before — thank you for waiting. It’s good to be back.

— Terveen

Three women. Two timelines. One curse that refuses to die. Set in the shadow-drenched villages of Uttar Pradesh, India — across the 1970s and the early 2000s — Cobra Orchard is a psychological thriller about secrets buried so deep, even the earth forgot them. A sinister guru’s prophecy binds three women to a fate none of them chose. A cobra, coiled and patient, waits for the right moment to strike. Nothing is as it seems. No one is who they claim to be. And the truth, when it finally surfaces, will obliterate everything you thought you knew about family, faith, and survival. Some truths take a generation to surface. Some debts take even longer to be paid. Read Cobra Orchard on Amazon Kindle

Terveen Gill is a writer who has always been drawn to the uncomfortable truth hiding beneath ordinary lives. A Times of India and Chandigarh Literary Society award-winning short story writer, she is also a graphic novel script writer, indie filmmaker, and a former engineer — a past life that still haunts her, compelling her to code emotion, action, and consequence into every story she tells.
 
Her debut psychological thriller Cobra Orchard is the culmination of that instinct: a dark, immersive novel about three women, a sinister guru, and secrets buried so deep they have begun to rot.

A keen observer of people and their unsettling nuances, she grew up in the United States before making her home in India, where her words give her company.

Her motto: if it can be imagined, it is already half-done.

Instagram: @terveengill

Have you ever waited years for something you believed in? Tell me below.