Ashritta Saran

I was trained originally as a dentist and later as a public health researcher, spending over a decade working across countries, institutions, and cultures — a professional life defined by evidence, data, and rigour.

My fiction comes from somewhere else entirely: the quieter spaces that data can't reach, where restraint becomes devotion and silence becomes its own language.

Parallel Heartbeats is my debut novel — the story of Ash and Aaryan, two people who meet as teenagers in Lucknow and are shaped permanently by a love that doesn't follow the usual rules of romance. Drawn from a real relationship in my own life, the book is less an act of invention than one of preservation — an attempt to honour a love that shaped both the person and the professional I became.

This is my first novel, written in the space between a career built on evidence and a story that could only be told in fiction