The Lost Generation

Some jobs in India are slowly disappearing, and the people who still do them carry a way of life that once belonged to everyone's grandparents. Nidhi Dugar Kundalia goes looking for them in the older streets and neighbourhoods where they work, and she gives eleven of these professionals their own stories.

Among the people she meets is a pandit in Haridwar who keeps the genealogical records of families, some going back centuries. There is a professional mourner who has perfected the craft of crying on demand, and a letter writer who stays quiet about the untruths a sex worker asks him to put in her letters to the family she left behind. The rudaalis, women hired to mourn, appear alongside a street dentist whose work is stranger than most readers would expect.

The book treats these lives with curiosity rather than nostalgia alone. Each profile mixes romance, sadness and a little eccentricity, and together they show how much living history is still tucked into India's ageing bylanes, and how fragile it has become.