With its mad patchwork of phone sex conversations, nightmarish torture scenes, tender love poems, numerology, mythology, and compulsive name-dropping of Latin American intellectuals, Charu Nivedita's novel Zero Degree stands out as a groundbreaking work of South Indian transgressive fiction that unflinchingly probes the deepest psychic wounds of humanity. "Zero Degree takes you apart and allows you to rearrange yourself as you please."