A camera is an interesting thing, you can take pictures with it. But imagine how interesting it would be if it could squeeze you through the funnel of time, and drop you on the other side. Mukul Kesavan was peering through such magical ground glass when he found himself transported right into the middle of history-in-the-making, into India in 1942 when popular ferment against the British was building up, and the script for the drama of Partition was being written up. With extraordinary inventiveness, Kesavan presents us with a mosaic of the ordinary lives that peopled our extraordinary times. To begin with, we are steeped into the sights and smells of Lucknow, only to be rapidly transported to Benaras and onwards. The plot demands that we do not tarry awhile in one place as we are inexorably propelled towards our destination - a post-Independence refugee camp in Delhi.

The clouds of history are at the horizon. And our protagonist struggles against his clairvoyance to hold together a carefully constructed life as the nation would be torn asunder. And thereby he posits the question - was Partition inevitable ?

Kesavan present us with a chain of stories strung together by the thread of his life. He populates his book with all manners of unlikely characters who live out their mostly miserable lives without the benefit of the author's "foresight" of what was to come . And somehow through this extraordinary tapestry of enmeshed lives we are to ponder the million dollar question of whether India had to be brutally chopped up in the manner it was. But therein lies the flaw of the whole enterprise. While the authors style is a sound literary device to conjure up vivid, delectable imagery, it is hardly capable of delineating the contours of the characters mind. In an attempt to recreate ordinary lives and their petty concerns, Kesavan has washed out all the "extraordinariness" of the times - resulting in bland characters who dont have a mind of their own on the matter anyway.

Having said that, I must add that reading the book did afford pleasure afterall. The novelty of the plot alone merits some interest, and the writing is delightful. The narrative is well-textured and the imagery conjured up is striking at times (eg. the sunlit description of a very pregnant Parwana - "the setting of her toes behind her rising belly"). However, a personal quibble I have is with the author's obsession with things scatalogical, the ``stink'' of which permeates the first third of the book. All in all, a readable book, but not one that adds to our understanding of the ordinary folk who lived through momentous and tragic times of recent Indian history.