Description

Twenty-eight-year-old Anaya Pillai is the newest senior product manager at one of Bangalore’s largest fintech startups — sharp, ambitious, just promoted from a Mumbai office, and absolutely not in Bangalore looking for love. She is in Bangalore looking for stock options.

She is also, by her fourth week, in trouble.

Her skip-level — Director of Product, recently divorced, thirty-six, infuriatingly competent, devastatingly fair — is Dhruv Iyengar. Dhruv runs his standup at 9:15 a.m. with the kind of unsmiling focus that makes Anaya’s roommate laugh out loud over coffee when Anaya tries to describe it. Dhruv writes feedback that makes her, for the first time in three years, actually want to be better at her job. Dhruv, on a Friday evening in November, accidentally meets her gaze in the lift for slightly longer than two professionals in a regulated workplace are entirely encouraged to.

What follows is a deliciously slow, sharply written, gloriously contemporary Bangalore office romance — set against late-night sprint reviews in HSR Layout, Saturday morning brunches in Indiranagar, fights about PIPs, and one company offsite in Coorg that neither of them is professionally equipped to survive.

For readers of *Ali Hazelwood* — *Bangalore Office Hours* is the modern Indian workplace romance you will read in two evenings and refuse to lend to anyone for at least six months.

Hot, smart, and absolutely impossible to put down.