Penguin Random House India announces THE CHABIMASTER by Harinder S. Sikka, a high-stakes espionage thriller unfolding amid General Zia-ul-Haq’s 1977 coup. Sikka, a former Indian Navy officer and Group Director at Piramal Group, is the bestselling author of CALLING SEHMAT, the novel that inspired the blockbuster film RAAZI.
Set amid General Zia‑ul‑Haq’s 1977 coup and the early years of martial law, the novel uses a rigorously researched political backdrop to examine the pressures on regional security. The narrative touches the shadow economy of weapons procurement and the quiet wars fought through access, information and engineering. At its centre is a safe designed to kill whoever opens it, a lethal piece of hardware that forces operatives to weigh the cost of a single life against the prevention of larger harm. The book’s texture lies in the specificity of its tradecraft such as floor plans, ingress routes, hotel logistics and technical problem‑solving, elements seldom seen with this granularity in Indian spy fiction.
The story follows Samy, a RAW specialist whose disarming mastery of locks earns him the name ‘Chabimaster’. Tasked with penetrating a clandestine network that may alter the regional balance, Samy’s pursuit moves across India, Pakistan, London and Istanbul. A concealed steel box and the papers it hides become the hinge upon which the plot turns, drawing readers into a sequence of operations where ingenuity and judgment matter as much as courage. The tone is taut and fact‑forward: this is a work of fiction that places its characters against documented history without claiming to fictionalise real individuals.
THE CHABIMASTER offers multiple points of entry: a timely look at procurement networks and counter‑proliferation; a debate on the ethics of necessary risk in covert action; and a lineage back to CALLING SEHMAT, the source of RAAZI, that made questions of espionage part of the mainstream conversation. The new novel invites comparison while standing on its own as a precision‑tooled narrative about method, consequence and the limits of certainty.
What’s exciting:
- Real geopolitics as canvas: set against Zia’s takeover and its aftershocks across South Asia.
- High-consequence stakes: a booby-trapped safe, a clandestine weapons network, and the race to penetrate it.
- Tradecraft on the page: granular operational detail: blueprints, ingress routes, and safe mechanisms, rare in Indian spy fiction.
- Ethics under pressure: the calculus of risk and collateral damage that intelligence professionals confront in the real world.
- From page to pop culture lineage: follows Sikka’s CALLING SEHMAT, adapted as RAAZI, to deliver another rigorously grounded spy narrative.
About The Author
Harinder S. Sikka served in the Indian Navy (commissioned 1981; retired as Lt Cdr in 1993) and is currently Group Director, Strategic Business at Piramal Group. He is the bestselling author of CALLING SEHMAT, as well as VICHHODA and GOBIND, and producer of NANAK SHAH FAKIR (recipient of three National Awards, including the Nargis Dutt Award). He lives in Delhi with his family.
