Exile

Suryakant's life starts to come apart when he is forced out of his government job. Needing money quickly, he takes work with a man named Ramjoar Pandey, tracing his family lineage. The task sends him back to his hometown of Sultanpur and to the family he had drifted away from.

The novel is set in the rough heartland of Uttar Pradesh. Its characters face cruelty, moral decay and deep loneliness, much of it traceable to the pressure of capitalism and consumerism. Memory and the present blend together as if in a dream, while the future looks like a dense knot of fear and worry.

The prose moves between remembered time and the immediate moment, and between being and not being. It follows ordinary people who find how thin the line is between freedom and exile, and shows the damage modern life can do to the human spirit.