These twelve stories recount the magical nature of memory, the sacred and the profane, and the restless power of love.

An uncast ballot precipitates social embarrassment and recalls a past love, a young housewife finds her kitchen plagued by unabashed passion in the flat next door; an aspiring novelist tries to forget near-manslaughter; a schoolgirl discovers the humorous travails of depilation; and, in a locked room, two medieval noblewomen recount the amorous avowals of a young soldier.

There's also the small matter of a dead camel lying unattended on the streets of Delhi.

These twelve stories explore the unsaid, the unfinished and the misunderstood, the shocks and nuances of love and sexuality, responsibility and ambition, and our tentative attempts to peel away the layers of stories that make up our lives.

"Beautifully precise writing. These stories capture people with such exactitude that you know they must come from a serious student of life. But this is one of those serious books at which you never stop laughing, for Parvati Sharma's sense of the world is lively, generous and wickedly original." — Rana Dasgupta, author of Solo