A tea cart, a measuring tape, and a city that refuses to be counted in inches
Evincepub Publishing announces Ten Inches: A Novel of Bada Shehar by Shekhar Nerala
Bilaspur, August 2026: Evincepub Publishing has published Ten Inches: A Novel of Bada Shehar, a novel by Shekhar Nerala about a tea vendor, a municipal notice, and the small distance between an official rule and an ordinary life.
For twenty-two years, Raju Prasad has poured chai from a cart at the Kali Gali junction. In that time his corner has become something the city never planned and does not recognise on any map. Clerks stop there before work and after arguments. Students borrow the bench and occasionally the sugar. Shopkeepers settle scores over glasses of tea, old women rest their bags, and everyone knows whose son has failed which examination. None of it is written down anywhere. All of it holds.
Then a survey party arrives with chalk and a measuring tape, and Raju’s cart is found to stand ten inches beyond a line he has never seen.
What follows is not a melodrama about a villain in a government jeep. Satya Prakash, the encroachment inspector who serves the notice, is a man who genuinely believes that rules exist to protect people, and who has reasons of his own for believing it. Nimmi Joshi, the young lawyer who takes Raju’s case, discovers that the simplest question a citizen can ask is often the hardest one for an institution to answer. Nerala keeps all three of them in view at once and refuses to let any of them off easily.
Ten Inches belongs to a durable tradition of Indian fiction, the kind that finds its largest subjects on the smallest patch of pavement. It is a novel about livelihood and paperwork, about the difference between being correct and being just, and about the unglamorous daily improvisations that keep a crowded city standing. It is also, in places, very funny, which is usually how such books tell the truth.
When asked what led him to write this book, the author quipped, “I have spent my working life around numbers and measurements, and I have watched how quickly a measurement can become a verdict. Ten inches is nothing. It is the length of a hand. It is also, on the right piece of pavement, someone’s entire life.”
About the author: Shekhar Nerala runs a management consultancy and strategy advisory practice, working with companies in consumer durables with a particular focus on luxury goods and services. He has been writing for many years across a range of genres and registers and has only recently decided to make that work public. Ten Inches is his first published novel, with further books in progress. He lives in Mumbai.
Book details: Ten Inches: A Novel of Bada Shehar by Shekhar Nerala. First edition, August 2026. Evincepub Publishing. ISBN 978-93-7335-322-7. Paperback, ₹399. Also available on Kindle. On sale through Amazon, Flipkart and evincepub.com.
Media enquiries: Review copies, extract permissions and author interviews:
Shekhar Nerala
+91 98337 28283
About Publisher: Evincepub Publishing is a trusted self-publishing company dedicated to helping authors transform their manuscripts into professionally published books. With comprehensive publishing, design, distribution, marketing, and author-support services, Evincepub empowers writers to reach readers worldwide while maintaining creative freedom, ownership, and control over their publishing journey.
