As a young boy Amitav Ghosh's narrator travels across time through the tales of those around him traversing through unreliable planes of memory unmindful of physical political and chronological borders. But as he grows older he is haunted by a seemingly random act of violence. Bits and pieces of stories both half-remembered and imagined come together in his mind until he arrives at an intricate interconnected picture of the world where borders and boundaries mean nothing mere shadow lines that w