A retired schoolteacher in present-day Calcutta is caught in the labyrinth of rusty bureaucracy and political crime under a communist government. Across a vast ocean of time, a widow leads a life of stark suffering in a wealthy feudal household in nineteenth-century, British-ruled Bengal, at a time when widow-burning has gone out of practice but widow remarriage is far from coming into vogue. As their stories begin to connect, they weave a larger narrative of historical forgetting, of voices that have been pushed out of the nations memory. And what we are left with is the intriguing tale of two cities: the same geographical space separated by decades of experience and neglect. This is a book to cherish for a very long time, for its descriptions and evocations as well as for what it tells us about the ebb and flow of human expectation.