At his mother’s funeral, Bhalu, a middle-aged Indian bookseller in Sussex, meets Phoebe, his childhood playmate, friend and sweetheart, after four decades. Slowly, Bhalu realises that something strange and evil happened 40 years ago, in the shadowy off-stage of the Nanavati murder case, which changed his life irrevocably and destroyed Phoebe’s mother. And the clues to the mystery lie concealed in his memories of childhood and youth. To pinpoint the evildoer, he has to, in fact, newly analyse his entire life.
Written in lyrical prose of exquisite precision, the novel flips back and forth in time to elaborate on its primary theme: how every past action sets off unpredictable chain reactions to create the present and the future. The descriptions of the Western Ghats and Bombay’s Dongri area are simply exceptional. But unlike many Indian English authors whose dulcet prose often hides the fact that they are but talented travel writers, Sinha tells a corking good tale: the old-fashioned type, which had plot, movement and characterisation.
