New Delhi, Mar 23 (PTI) In his new novel "Visitors to the House", author Shashank Gupta invites readers to a charming cottage set in a hillside to meet five completely diverse characters, and to live their five different stories.

Gupta says in this world of rush-rush and push-push, he wanted to take his readers - both young and old - back to the early seventies when a letter took two days to write and three weeks to reach.

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"I wished to create the romance of the past, the aimless walks and town-folk who could scold you because they thought you belonged to them too. I hoped to remind myself as well of those days where smartness and charity were a far lesser virtue than humility and generosity," he says.

The green-roofed house in the hills, three miles from Didoli town, overlooks a gorge with a gamboling stream far down below. It has lived here for many years opening its arms and eyes - its gates and windows - to all sorts of visitors including the current occupants who have chosen to escape the clockwork precision of Delhi for the laidback music of birds, bugs, pines, wind, water and the wild beasts.

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"Visitors To The House", published by HarperCollins India, comes in five parts because it is a story told by five different people about five different visitors to the house, over 30 years.

And as the tale grows so do the characters and their relationships with each other and the new guests, who end up becoming a cog in the family. So a dog named Vurf, a ghost called Mira, Kadu - the gypsy girl, Ehet - the runaway child actor, and an autistic boy of six still called Baby drop-in, stay a while and bring something special that lives on at the house in the very grain of the wooden beams and floorboards.

Although three of the narrators and every protagonist in the telling is a child, this is not a coming-of-age novel, it's about finally growing-up for both the young and old alike.

What really visit the house are concepts long abandoned like the kindness of spotted lonesome leopards and the emotions embedded in hard-hearted hailstones.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)