Publisher's Synopsis
When Kalika loses one of her twins at childbirth, a daughter she longed for, it is not the only loss in the family. The son that survives loses the love of his mother. Her son grows up needing to be the daughter his mother wants but struggles in a recently Independent India still haunted by its colonial past, its mystical religious rites and its birth into the world. Sarayu Srivatsa has created a family portrait suffused and coloured by the landscape of Southern India, where history, religion and gender collide in a family scarred by its past and struggling with the present.
