Night falls in Delhi as a mother lies beside her sleeping daughter in a house filled with the rustle of strange creatures, spinning tales from her past. Her now grown-up child is a puzzle with a million pieces and she hopes, through her words and her love, to somehow fit them together once again.
Meanwhile, the last train from Rijiv Chowk Station pulls away and a young man with darkness in his heart rides the metro and dreams of murder.
In another corner of the city, a woman steps off an auto-rickshaw, carrying her newborn wrapped in a blood-red towel. She leaves her baby on the doorstep of an orphanage and walks away into a wind that slaps her in the face and fills her eyes with tears.
There are twenty million bodies in this city and these are only three. But their stories, of a secret love that blossoms in the shadows of grief, of a corrosive guilt that taints the soul, and of an orphaned boy in a land of orphaned girls who maps out his own destiny, weave into the lives of those around them to form a dazzling kaleidoscope of modern India in all its complexity.
Beautifully strange and audacious, this is the story of a city and its people, of love and horror, of belonging and forgiveness: a state of the nation novel for modern India.
