Novelists often fill a page or two thanking spouse, mistress, extended family, sundry typists and proofreaders, a dead grandfather for gifting the first fountain pen, which put the child prodigy ‘on the road to writing’ (to the distress of his or her ever-diminishing family of readers). I ain’t gonna do any such thing.
I will firstly thank my childhood for the four years I spent in Junagadh from 1945 to 1948. Secondly, I should thank M.N. Buch for handing me the papers of his father, who was the commissioner at Rajkot during 1947. I propose to thank the first two readers of my manuscript: Namita Gokhale and Karthika V.K. Thirdly, a word of thanks to the Indian Institute for Advanced Studies, Shimla, where as a guest fellow, I wrote some chapters of the novel. Lastly, I must thank Somak Ghoshal, the editor, meticulous as always, who has improved the novel considerably.