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A rich and dramatic story of a poor young Indian boy who fights like a tiger to achieve fame and fortune.In a village just outside present-day Calcutta, Koonty, a young girl, is squatting in pain beside the river, convinced that her agony is the result of a fish allergy. It’s not – she’s giving birth and as the realisation dawns on her, she makes the connection with the encounter she had all those months ago with the swimming stranger with the golden bathing shorts...Horrified, she places the baby onto a piece of floating debris, fixes her own necklace around his neck and pushes him downriver. Several miles downstream in Calcutta, the baby is discovered by Dolly, a young married woman desperate for a child. She takes him home and brings him up as her own son, calling him Karna.And so begins a chain of events which sees Karna’s initial good fortune turn to tragedy so that, years later, he’s forced to seek out Koonty, now married and with a son of her own...
A young man named Karna navigates a life defined by his mysterious origins and a desperate struggle to transcend his humble beginnings in modern India. After being abandoned as an infant on the river by his biological mother, Koonty, Karna is raised by a woman named Dolly who yearns for a child. As he matures, his life is marked by a series of volatile shifts between fortune and tragedy, eventually compelling him to confront the truth of his past. The narrative follows his trajectory as he seeks out his birth mother, who has since moved on to a different life, creating a collision between his current reality and his forgotten history.
This novel presents a character-focused examination of fate and the enduring influence of one's origins. The narrative structure relies on the tension between the protagonist's drive for success and the inescapable gravity of his past. Readers likely find the exploration of the mother-son dynamic to be the central emotional anchor of the story. The prose style suggests a grounded, observational approach to the social realities of the setting, avoiding overly sentimental resolutions in favor of a more complex portrayal of human ambition and regret.
Page Count:
368
Publication Date:
2013-03-28
Publisher:
HarperCollins UK
ISBN-10:
0007405049
ISBN-13:
9780007405046
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