Roy was an architect by training, and this novel examines how a novel could be built. The novel begins with an epigraph from iconic British critic and novelist John Berger (1926-2019), whose pioneering essays on contemporary art often explored how artists experiment with perception: “Never again will a single story be told as though it’s the only one.” The interest, then, is not just on the stories of one family’s decline but in how those stories are told.

Although the story covers a sequence of events centered first over Christmas 1969 and then again in summer 1993, and offers a tight series of linked plot points, the novel itself is non-linear, an intricate formal construct that covers those events in a uniquely non-sequential, non-chronological order. No doubt the story of Estha’s molestation, Ammu’s torrid and taboo affair, the accidental drowning of young Sophie Mol, the arrest and beating death of the innocent Velutha, or the sexual tension between the twins would each make for a sturdy conventional linear narrative. The novel rejects that chronological logic to reflect the larger theme that the past is never really the past and that everyone per force lives in multiple tenses simultaneously.