A saga of flight & pursuit, this novel chronicles the adventures of Alu, a young weaver who is wrongly suspected of being a terrorist. Chased from Bengal to Bombay & on through the Persian Gulf to North Africa by a bird-watching police inspector, Alu encounters along the way a cast of characters as various & as colourful as the epithets with which the author adorns them. The reader is drawn into their lives by incidents tender & outrageous & all compellingly told. Ghosh is as natural a weaver of words as Alu is of cloth, deftly interlacing humour & wisdom to produce a narrative tapestry of surpassing beauty.