Looking Through Glass

Book excerpt: At The Close Of The Twentieth Century, A Young Photographer On A Train To Lucknow Suddenly Finds Himself In The Deep End Of 1942. Adrift In The Final Years Of The Raj, He Improvises A Life, And Is Caught Up In The Fates Of Ammi, Forever Waiting For A Vanished Husband; Masroor, Desperate To Stall A Hindu Vs Muslim Cricket Match; Chaubey, A Rebel Turned Repertory Star; Parwana, Who Starts Life As An Orphan And Nearly Ends It As An Ersatz Widow On A Make-Believe Pyre; Gyanendra, A Pioneering Pornographer; Carrick, A Parson Worried About The Millions Starving In Bengal; And The Narrator S Own Grandmother, Whom He Personally Cremated Not So Long Ago. But Hindsight Tells Him That Partition Will Destroy This World. And In His Desperate Struggles To Avert The Inevitable, We Discover, Often With An Almost Unbearable Poignance, How The Possibilities In India S Past Were Squandered, Some Wantonly, Others Accidentally.