Reading Time: 4 minutes
People ask me why I set my psychological thriller in rural India. Why didn’t I set my novel in a city? Some place like Delhi or maybe Mumbai. Somewhere with people and traffic, the kind of modern chaos that English language Indian fiction tends to reach for when it wants to feel important and urgent.
My answer is always the same. The story I needed to tell could only happen in the villages of India.
Cobra Orchard is a psychological thriller set in rural India, across three villages in the 1970s and the early 2000s.
One of them is a small place in the Rudraprayag district of Uttar Pradesh, India, where farmers grow rice and jowar and bajra, the local high school draws children from neighboring villages, caste and religion exist as categories, but survival has always mattered more.
It is not a dramatic landscape in the cinematic sense. There are no monuments. There is no skyline. What there is, in abundance, is silence.
And silence is the engine of a psychological thriller set in rural India in a way that no city can replicate.
In urban India, silence can be broken. There are therapists now, there are hotlines, online communities where someone can say the unspeakable and find that others have said it too. In a village in the 1970s and early 2000s, there was none of this. If the family decided something would not be spoken, it was not spoken.
If a truth was dangerous to name, it remained unnamed. What happened inside stayed inside, passed down through behavior and fear. The particular way a mother looked at her daughter, for years, without saying what she really thought.
This is the world Cobra Orchard is built from. A world where secrets stay buried.
I grew up in the United States and now live in India. I did not grow up in a village. I do not pretend to. But I spent ten years in the company of the women in this book. And what I slowly understood over that decade, is that the specificity of the setting is inseparable from the damage the story describes.
The isolation of those villages is not backdrop. It is the condition that makes everything else possible.
The guru’s power over a family depends on there being no competing voice of authority. The secret that travels from the 1970s into the early 2000s depends on a community that had no language for what happened and no structure through which to name it.
Rural India gave me that. It gave me a landscape where women’s fates were decided before they were old enough to question them. Where obedience was called devotion. It also gave me something I did not expect when I started writing. Warmth. The villages in Cobra Orchard are not places of pure darkness. The villagers understand something important: that prosperity is impossible without kinship.
You survive together or you do not survive at all. This is the other face of the rural world this book inhabits.
I did not want to write past it.
The darkness in Cobra Orchard is dark because it exists inside a community that knows how to love, that has rituals for grief and celebration, that passes wisdom from one generation to the next alongside the damage. That tension is what a psychological thriller set in rural India can hold that a city story cannot.
The intimacy of a village means everyone is implicated. There are no strangers to blame. The person who hurts you is also the person who feeds you, prays with you, attends your wedding. The danger is domestic. The secrets are shared.
Thirty years after the 1970s timeline ends, three women are still paying for what went unsaid in those villages. This is Cobra Orchard. This is the only place it could have been born.
Cobra Orchard is available on Amazon Kindle. If you have ever felt the weight of something your family could not say, I think you will find it on every page.
Dive deeper into the soul of Cobra Orchard with strange silences.
Visit me on Instagram as I talk about the difficult real-life themes of Cobra Orchard.
Is there a place, a village, a house, a landscape that shaped your family in ways that were never fully spoken about?
If the villages of rural India intrigue you, explore Cobra Orchard and see what readers have said.
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. 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.
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.
I would liked to have seen a titillating taste of the novel: perhaps the opening paragraphs —
Will definitely reveal those, John. Hope you enjoy them! Thank you. 😀
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