Harish Mehta was born, fortuitously, in Lucknow, a city of Nawabs, where he attended university and soaked in Awadh’s rich history. In his early-twenties, he moved to Bombay to work, first as an advertising copywriter, then in journalism. At the time, the poet Imtiaz Dharker, the poetry editor of the magazine, Debonair, published his first poems. At Imprint magazine he worked alongside the poet Dom Moraes, and the duo travelled together to Punjab at the height of the Sikh militancy, and to the still-peaceful haven of Kashmir in 1987. In the evenings, Dom would talk poetry. Mehta would answer, but it could have been verse. Mehta lived overseas since then, spending seventeen years as a senior correspondent with the Business Times of Singapore, where he married the poet and author, Julie Banerjee. He did graduate studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and earned a doctorate in History at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, and then taught at McMaster, University of Toronto, and Trent University. After almost four decades abroad, the Mehtas returned to Calcutta. This is his first novel in verse.