Sikandar Chowk Park

After a bomb blast rips through Sikandar Chowk Park Allahabad killing fifty-seven people a journalist pieces together the lives of eleven of the dead from the heap of mutilated bodies.. Among them a self-effacing music teacher who won't go abroad on a fellowship because of his family of stray dogs an Anglo-Indian widow coping with the knowledge of her husband's infidelity thirty-five years ago a precocious 'problem' child a firebrand feminist confronting the sexual misdemeanours of her friend's husband and a young Dalit woman who defies her marriage and her society and enters into a relationship with an unemployed Brahmin boy-all ordinary people leading ordinary lives in a quintessential mofussil Indian township.. Neelum Saran Gour's vibrant prose conjures up a multitude of characters involved in a maze of relationships and the dynamics of events which propel them to Sikandar Chowk Park on the fateful day. In the process she crafts a talk at once poignant and witty which ingeniously addresses contemporary issues of communal and caste prejudices bigotry and faith forgiveness and redemption.