Lessons in Forgetting

Meera has settled comfortably into life as a corporate wife who writes cookbooks. Then her husband simply does not come home one day, and she is left in charge of far more than she expected: her children Nayantara and Nikhil, her mother Saro, her grandmother Lily, and Lilac House, the sprawling old family home in Bangalore.

Elsewhere in the city, Professor J.A. Krishnamurthy, known as Jak, has just come back from America. He studies cyclones, has survived one marriage and a number of other entanglements, and now faces something he cannot study from a distance. His nineteen-year-old daughter Smriti lies in a bedroom of his house, a living reminder of a violent act and everything it erased. The police offer no help, her friends have disappeared, and fear and silence close around what happened. Jak will not stop until he learns the truth.

A run of coincidences draws Meera and Jak together, and their lives begin to turn around each other with the unpredictability, and the odd inevitability, of a cyclone. Anita Nair's novel is about loss and the unexpected ways a person starts over, finding beginnings in places that looked like the end.