Since I Was Nine

Description

In the house on Roshan Vihar Lane, Lucknow, eleven people breathe together and call it home. Arjun Mehrotra is nine years old. Then, on a Sunday in August, the joint family fractures and a sensitive boy learns the most consequential lesson of his childhood: the inside is not safe to show. He carries this lesson across forty-one years. Every year he reaches towards someone and every year returns broken a little more. He becomes brilliant, accomplished, admired. And entirely alone. The deer runs deeper into the forest. Since I Was Nine is the story of the aam aadmi of North India the man who feels everything and shows nothing. The wound that is not the character. The fragrance that was never outside. And a man learning, at fifty, that kasturi kundal base the musk was always within. The wound is not the character. This book will give words to people who have been wordless for decades.