PAST CONTINUOUS
Ritwik Ghosh, twenty-two, recently orphaned, and lonely as hell, finds a chance to start his life all over again when he arrives in England to study. But to do that, he must not only relive his entire past but also try to understand it, naming things, making connections, unravelling the thread of a narrative he can only now bring himself to read. Above all, he must make sense of his relationship with his mother, tender, scarred, abusive and all-consuming. But Oxford holds little of the salvation Ritwik is looking for and as he loses himself in the big city and takes up residence with the old Anne Cameron, he drops out of official existence into a shadowy hinterland of aliens.