The dogs of Justice relentlessly chase those enmeshed in attachment and consuming desire. Shahnaz leaves the legacy of this knowledge to her daughter, but first she learns it well herself, slowly and through much suffering. Shahnaz goes from a fashionable education in Geneva straight into the turmoil of pre-independence politics in Kashmir. One passion leads to another. Through her desperate and unquestioning love for Aslam Sheikh, she becomes involved in terrorist action and blows up a bridge in Baramulla, right next to her father’s cherry orchards. Her lover is imprisoned and tortured, and she loses him. Shahnaz’s personal life, stretched out on the canvas of Modern India, takes a bizarre turn via laburnum-jungles to a last point when the dogs take over. A dreadful vortex sucks in several lives. Nina Sibal has touched on this theme in an earlier novel, Yatra, and is exploring it further in a novel-in-progress about Shahnaz’s daughter, Rohina.
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