About

About Inara Library

Inara Library is a small publisher I started for one reason. I wanted my daughter to grow up able to read Punjabi.

It started as a song. Every night when I put Inara to sleep, I would make up small lines in Punjabi for her. After some time she started saying the lines back to me. That is when I thought these lines should become a book.

We live in America, and I want Inara to keep her Punjabi. I think a child learns a language best when the words come with colours and pictures she loves. So every page here has three lines. One in Punjabi, one in English letters so anyone can say it out loud, and one in English so she knows what it means.

Thank you to my wife Tanya. These books belong to her as much as to me.

About the author

Satbir Malhi

Satbir Malhi grew up in the village of Tharu in Tarn Taran, Punjab, and moved to the United States in 2011. He holds a PhD in Mathematics and works in marketing data science, where he studies patterns, uncertainty, and the hidden structures within complex systems.

His writing began with a deeply personal reason: after the birth of his daughter, Inara, he wanted her to grow up connected to the language and cultural world of her family. What began as an effort to preserve Punjabi for his daughter grew into a broader fascination with storytelling.

He writes across genres, moving between children's literature and psychological thrillers, often bringing together mathematics, human behaviour, causality, and narrative structure in unconventional ways.

Satbir lives in California with his family.

An imprint of Partners Insights. Write to inaralibrary@gmail.com.

The family

Everyone in these books is real

Every person on these pages is a real member of my family, drawn from a photograph. Mumma, Papa, Dadi, Chacha, Chachi, Veera, Didi. They are not invented characters.

That is also why the custom books work. The same thing can be done with your family.

See the books Make your family's book

Not for children

For grown-ups

Satbir also writes for adults. This is a different shelf, and it is deliberately at the bottom of the page.

Eleven Feet

A Novel of the Ranga Billa Case, the Crime That Taught Delhi to Be Afraid

by Satbir Malhi

A novel for adults. It is built on a real crime against two children in Delhi in 1978, and it is not for young readers.

Delhi, 26 August 1978. At dusk on a Saturday, a brother and sister are taken off the road into a stolen yellow Fiat. Inside fifteen minutes, two strangers see the struggle. One phones the police with the number off the back of the car. One goes after it on a scooter, loses it at a red light, and is told he has come to the wrong police station.

Everybody in India knows how this ends. Eleven Feet is the story of the three years and five months in between, told by one of the two men, from a cell eleven feet from the other.

A novel built on the record. The dates, the places, the evidence and the courts are as they were. What is invented is the inside of a man.

Kindle edition