This extraordinary, layered novel plays with language, time and place to tell the story of three generation of two families – of merchants and labourers – whose intertwined fates unspool at the beginning in the early twentieth century. Permeated with the words of Hindi and Urdu writers and poets and with Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas as a leitmotif, Bagchi’s audacious telling vividly brings a pre-Partition Delhi to the page while also invoking, with sublime subtlety, the aches and joys of family, nostalgia and depicting the complex interplay of classes and religion.