Janak, a mild-mannered tailor in the remote village of Giripul, is besotted with his beautiful but sullen wife. All he wants is her love. Instead, he must deal all day with the village women who come to him with bits of cloth to stitch - and their dreams. Including the headman's third wife, who has a recurrent and rather ominous dream of beheading her husband. Then, one day, as the villagers watch in fascination the antics of a travelling magician, a dead body turns up outside Janak's shop. And overnight the placid little village tucked in the Himalayan foothills becomes a simmering cauldron of suspicious activity and strangers walking in and out. From the headman's third wife and his Chinese hairdresser-mistress to Shankar the fisherman-turned-sleuth, Lala the teashop owner and his ex-contract killer cook, every one becomes a suspect. Will the tailor of Giripul be able to solve the mystery? Will their lives return to normal, or will the aftershock of the killing change things forever? Redolent with the smells and sounds of a village buried in another time, this is a novel about an India we rarely read about.
