‘Life doesn’t have a plot. We don’t know what is going to happen next year, so I let the story develop like that. I like to write it that way, as the unknown unfolds’ It is thus that Ananda Mukerji commented on the unfolding of his first novel And Where, My Friend, Lay You Hiding? And, indeed, there is an unforced, dream-like quality about the book. A river runs through the book and carries with it the dreams of the people who live along its banks; just as the river Ganga runs through the lives of many Indians. Among them are people who can chronicle the history of their times, like the old Havildar of Mirpur, the book’s mythical village; boatmen who earn their livelihood by ferrying people across it, priests and temple goers who worship on its holy shores – these make up the persistent mental landscape of the book, that which is constant and continuing but also ever-changing, like the flow of the river, moving incessantly.
February 2007, volume 31, No 2