Some cities are not built of stone but of memory. Banaras is one such city—etched in ash and incense, prayer and silence, where time does not pass so much as circle back upon itself. In Banaras – An Eternal Love Story, Saurabh Singh allows this eternal city to breathe, watch, and remember, transforming it into the quiet custodian of a love that dares to imagine another life.

Though Singh now lives in the United States and works within the precision of the tech world, his writing repeatedly returns to the unsettled heart of India. His stories move between inheritance and escape, between duty that binds and desire that beckons. With a restrained hand and a lyrical gaze, he writes not of rebellion as spectacle, but as a trembling, intimate choice.

At the centre of this novel stand Shourya and Naina, born into legacies heavy as monsoon clouds. Shourya, measured and inward, is heir to Bihar’s formidable sand empire, carrying his father’s name like a vow etched into his spine. Naina, luminous and unafraid, is the daughter of Uttar Pradesh’s feared “Liquor King,” raised amid power, rumour, and watchful eyes. Each arrives at Banaras Hindu University already shaped by destinies they did not choose.

When they meet, it is less collision than recognition—a quiet knowing that slips into the spaces between lectures and late evenings. Their love grows in half-lit corridors and along the ancient ghats, where the Ganga moves with the patience of centuries. In each other, they find a rare permission: to pause, to dream, to step briefly outside the lives written for them.

But Banaras is a city that sees. It listens. Here, tradition does not shout—it endures. Love, once discovered, becomes an act of defiance performed in whispers. Every stolen moment is weighed against ancestry, every hope tempered by the knowledge that legacies, like rivers, resist diversion. The Ganga, shimmering and indifferent, asks the novel’s central question without words: can love change direction, or must it surrender to the current?

Singh’s prose carries the confidence of restraint. He does not force conclusions; instead, he lets silences speak for themselves. This quiet power has marked his earlier works as well. Nirbhaya: A Common Man’s Justice confronted the moral fractures exposed by the Nirbhaya tragedy, earning national attention from The Wire, Outlook, and PTI. His debut, College 2 Company: A Journey of an Engineer, captured the uncertain threshold between youth and responsibility with unflinching honesty.

Beyond the page, Singh is also a poet and storyteller whose growing digital audience responds to his sensitivity to India’s shifting cultural weather. His words carry the cadence of lived experience, attentive to the ways tradition bends, but rarely breaks.

Banaras – An Eternal Love Story reads like a river hymn—measured, yearning, and unresolved. It lingers not as a conclusion, but as a question, echoing long after the final page: in a world governed by memory and bloodline, is love bold enough to become its own destiny?