Overview

Guilty of the crime of sleeping on the job, the lowly yaksha Prem Chandra Guha, is banished to India on a punishment posting. During his stay here, he must write a sufficiently riveting history of the land of his exile. Prem Chandra arrives in India on the first dawn of her independence and fate brings him to Netarhat, an obscure town near the forests of Chhota Nagpur. It is here that he meets Manhoos, an orphaned urchin who repairs motor vehicles for a living, and his friend Mary, a feisty tribal girl from the nearby Santhal village.Assuming the shape of a common sparrow, Prem Chandra turns into an unobtrusive observer and follows the fortunes of Manhoos and Mary as they travel to Calcutta, and then to Rishikesh, Bangalore, Ahmedabad… As they plunge from one adventure to another, a series of figures play key roles in their lives: the Naxal leader Charu Majumdar; Satyajit Ray, in his crisp dhoti and clipped accent; the ever-giggling Maharishi Mahesh Yogi; the powerful business magnate, Ameer Premji; and even a mysterious man with a 56-inch chest.

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Nilanjan P. Choudhury’s most recent novel is Shillong Times, a coming-of-age story set against the insider-outsider conflict in Shillong in the 1980s. It has been widely recognized as an important new voice in the literature of the Northeast. His debut novel, a mythological thriller entitled Bali and the Ocean of Milk, was a best-seller. His subsequent writings include The Case of the Secretive Sister, a contemporary detective caper set in Bangalore and The Square Root of a Sonnet, a pioneering play on the history and science of black holes, both of which received wide critical acclaim. Nilanjan grew up in Shillong and now lives in Bangalore with his family.

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