Anuradha Roy's story of a family in the first hall of the twenthieth century begins on edge of a mud-brown river in spate, swollen,menacing, infinately destructive. Here, in a remote town in north india, an eccentric patriach shelters an abandoned child, not realising that the boy will transform his world.

Beneath the trickle of the family's ordinary life, deep currents swell.Nirmal dreams of a happiness that cannot be with a widowed cousin.His mothers feels her grasp over reality slipping even as her husband.Amulya lost in hios own world, shapes and reshapes his exquisite garden.Meanwhile, Nirmals daughter bakul runs wild witrh the orphan mukunda, And as their closeness changes into something else, it threatens to destroy those around them.