The Last Pretence

Machilipatnam, a small town on the Coromandel coast in South India where the British first landed to trade in dyes, comes to life through a lively cast of characters – Ammamai, resigned to her widowhood, but a fighter; Saroja, the pseudo-intellectual who owns and runs the Victorian dyes factory; Kamala, the eunuch, who carries within her a painful past and Raman, the mosquito-scientist whose experiment with the malarial insect comes to be known as the Raman Technique. Then there is the ghost of Elizabeth Gibbs, the bored English woman who slept with her equally bored brother George and gave birth to a hermaphrodite. And Nayantara, who teaches Mallika all there is to know about love. But above all, this is Mallika and Siva’s story – a mother and son in a complex and deeply disturbing relationship.