Honoured Sir,
We are in gravest need of your services. For the last few months, a large tiger has turned maneater. It is difficult knowing precisely because this maneater is a true shaitan — a devil wearing tiger (some say leopard) face. It attack at day like tiger. It attack at night like leopard. It does not sleep or rest like ordinary animals. Some say that bullets cannot touch it and never will. And that the spirits of the dead guide it.
The tally of the dead stands at thirty men, forty-two women, and three children.
Our grazing cows have become thin. You can count their bones under their skin. Our people also become like the cows. In our huts, only fear lives.
Mohan Sahib. It is high time that you return to the land of your mother.
Your most humble and sincere well-wisher,
Kali Prasad Rao
Headman, Village of Tatiali Bazaar
SHIKARI is a completed novel — 173,000 words — told in four movements, each titled from Yeats’s “The Second Coming”: The Widening Gyre · The Falcon and the Falconer · Things Fall Apart · The Blood-Dimmed Tide. Colonial hunting memoir, Gnostic cosmology, and the occult history of the Lost Generation, braided into one hunt.
Its author’s first novel, THE STORM, sold at auction and appeared on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. It has been translated worldwide.
Offered for series adaptation. The full manuscript and supporting materials are available on request.
RIGHTS & INQUIRIES: ARIF ANWAR · READ THE PROLOGUE
The photograph of the Nine is a conceptual composite. All other materials are by human hands, in the public domain: Colman Smith, the Ripley Scroll, the Splendor Solis, Khunrath, Agrippa, a Tibetan scribe whose name is lost, Montfaucon, Watts, Vedder, Lockwood Kipling, the Survey of India, P.&O. and B.I.S.N. ephemera, period press, the Disorders Inquiry Committee, a Holland & Holland catalogue, and the Sigillum Dei Æmeth after Dee. Human artists are being commissioned for the world of Shikari. © 2026 Arif Anwar. As above, so below.