After years of absence, American travel writer Max Gate returns to
Bengal, to the beach home of his longtime friend, the businessman Byron
Mallick. The occasion is a funeral: for Damini, fervent investigative
journalist and founder of a women's shelter, with whom Max once
collaborated, until ultimately she scorned the book he wrote on their
work together. It is irrefutable that Byron Mallick donated not milk,
but milk adulterated with chalk, to the women and children at Damini's
shelter--but did he also, to save his reputation, have her killed? The
weight of this question burdens each character in this intricate,
superbly crafted novel--Max; his former brother-in-law Piers O'Reilly,
convinced of Byron's guilt; and Damini's cousin and Byron's former ward
Ela, whose affair with Max has haunted both their lives, ending his
marriage and setting him unaccountably adrift. Sunetra Gupta's
consummate prose recreates the ache and complication of memory, as Max
considers the tantalizing ambiguities of each of their pasts, the
exquisite layers of emotion and action out of which, perhaps, the truth
about Byron may be revealed.