The book opens on a note of deceptively light-hearted inconsequence: an isolated, decaying house in the foothills of the Himalayas, a 16-year-old Indian girl reading about giant squid in an old National Geographic magazine and yearning for her handsome Nepalese tutor. Her grand-father, a retired judge whose affections are reserved for the pet dog snoring at his feet, plays chess against himself, examines the tea tray and berates the cook for the absence of scones. The mood would seem to be Merchant-Ivory. But, unseen, boys are creeping through the undergrowth towards the house with a very different sort of heritage on their minds. One carries a gun. Everything is about to change.

Kiran Desai’s second novel takes as its point of departure the Nepali insurgency of the 1980s, when frustrated demands for a separate state of Gorkhaland erupted into riots and terrorism, with the town of Kalimpong under siege, and the Indian army called in to restore — with savagery — a version of law and order.

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