Lessons in Forgetting

Meera is happily submerged in the role of corporate wife and writer of cookbooks. Then, one day, her husband fails to come home. Overnight, she becomes responsible not just for her children Nayantara and Nikhil, but also her mother Saro, her grandmother Lily and the running of Lilac House, their rambling old family home in Bangalore. Professor J.A. Krishnamurthy or Jak, cyclone studies expert, survivor of one marriage and several other encounters, has only recently returned from America. In a bedroom in his house lies his nineteen-year-old daughter Smriti, a tragic embodiment of memory and past violence. The police will not help, Smriti’s friends have vanished, and a wall of silence and fear surrounds the incident. But Jak cannot rest till he gets to the truth.By a series of coincidences Meera and Jak find their lives turning and twisting together, with the unpredictability and sheer inevitability of a cyclone. And as the days pass, fresh beginnings appear where there seemed to be only endings.