Cash, Crime & Chaos
Currency vanishes overnight, and a slum dweller is drawn into a fixer’s dangerous trade. Loyalty frays. Betrayal waits. A debut novel of ambition, morality, and the cost of survival.
Chartered Accountant • Debut Novelist
Vikrant Jain is a Mumbai-based Chartered Accountant and investment banker. His working life sits inside money, markets, and the systems that move wealth, and that proximity gives his fiction an insider’s ear for how power actually behaves.
He watches people most closely when a crisis strips the performance away. His writing pairs satire with psychological depth, tracing the moral bargains people strike once ordinary rules no longer hold.
The Demonetisation Diary: Cash, Crime & Chaos is his debut novel, drawn from the shock of demonetisation in India. Through it he offers a story that is gripping and uneasy at once, alive to the contradictions of a country remade overnight.
The Demonetisation Diary: Cash, Crime & Chaos is set in the hours after one of India’s most disruptive financial shocks. Currency disappears overnight. Queues, rumour, and opportunity rush in to fill the silence the notes leave behind.
Mangesh, a struggling slum dweller, is pulled into a dangerous trade in illegal cash conversion. Raghu, a powerful fixer, runs the network above him — a high-stakes arrangement in which loyalty is thin and betrayal is only a matter of timing.
As their worlds collide, the story moves from cramped lanes to the corridors where influence is traded. Layered characters, sudden turns, and private conflicts ask what ambition costs when survival itself has been repriced.
Realism and dark humour sit side by side. The novel looks at how crisis rearranges human behaviour, and at the choices, consequences, and stubborn resilience that remain when a system strains and people must decide who they will be.
A crisis does not change a city. It reveals it.
Where the notes vanish, loyalty is the first thing spent.
Survival always sends someone else the bill.
Write to Vikrant Jain about the novel, the night the currency changed, or the bargains people make when survival is the only honest account.
