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Brought to Calcutta by his widowed mother in 1857, Hiran turns out to have few talents, apart from an uncanny ability to read a man’s lines in his palm. When luck gets him a job in the auction house, he finds himself embroiled in the affairs of his nefarious superior and commissioned to procure a child for the wife of his superior from the slums of Calcutta. Hiran, the simple opium clerk, then stumbles on his own future. He of all men, who can read the lines of ...
1855: on a deserted island off the coast of Africa, the most audacious experiment ever envisaged is about to begin. To settle an argument that has raged inconclusively for decades, two scientists dream up an elaborate experiment. A pair of infants, one black, one white, are to be raised on a barren island, exposed to the dangers all around them, tended only by a young nurse whose muteness renders her incapable of influencing them in any way, for good or for bad. ...
Politics and passion fill the pages of Kunal Basu’s exquisite new novel, a richly imagined tale as detailed and sumptuous as the paintings it evokes. Bihzad is the most gifted and the most wayward member in the royal workshop, the son of the chief artist at the court of Akbar, the Great Mughal. When the emperor decides to move the court from Agra to his new capital at Fatehpur Sikri, he takes the brilliant young man with him. Everyone expects that he will one ...
An Indian man writes to a Japanese woman. She writes back. The pen friends fall in lover and exchange their vows over letters, then live as man and wire without ever setting eyes on each other - their intimacy of words rested finally by life's miraculous upheavals.The twelve stories in this collection are about the unexpected. An American professor visits India with the purpose of committing suicide, and goes on a desert journey with the daughter of a snake ...