‘Once Upon a Summer’ explores power dynamics in romantic relationships in the colonial era

“All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.” If you grew up during the 1990s like me, then you must have read disclaimers like this at the beginning of a movie or a television show, a standard legal statement used to protect filmmakers from potential lawsuits.

These lines kept returning to me as I read Manjul Bajaj’s novel, Once Upon a Summer.

In the note at the end of the book, the author tells us that an unexpected social media post inspired the basic plot, which is quite a story in its own right. Bajaj encountered the story about the two protagonists, Madeline and Azeem, in the archives of private memory, on a Facebook group of Nainital residents. This sparked her interest in writing the novel.

What is interesting is that Bajaj chose to set this story in a genre that is perhaps a bit archaic at this point – that of a British Raj romance. A real-life story in a genre well-travelled, of once-high commercial appeal – a risky road all around for a novelist in 2025. You know as much even before you start reading the novel. The question, therefore, becomes: Is this...

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