'She missed the sense of values Shivraj had planted like roses with his two hands. It was their fragrance, something as ephemeral as that, that had bound the country together in a unity, not any hidebound principle or rule from a book.'

Shivraj is dead and with him the values with which he had governed the country for over a decade. While his successors destroy the idealistic world he had built, Shivraj's circle of intimate friends-his sister Devi, the education minister; Usman Ali, vice chancellor of Delhi University; and Michael Calvert, an English writer-struggle to find order in the chaos, even as Rishad, Devi's son, loses himself in it.

To be updated