In this short story collection set in the Indian city of Kittur sometime between the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and that of her son Rajiv in 1991, Adiga creates a cast of characters--from a twelve-year old boy to a Marxist-Maoist Party member--who are immersed in class struggles and their own personal denouements.

Spanning the lifetime of one woman (1896-1962), The Toss of a Lemon brings readers intimately into a Brahmin household, into an India in the midst of social and political upheaval. Married at ten, widowed at eighteen, left with two children, Sivakami must wear widow's whites, shave her head, and touch no one from dawn to dusk. She is not allowed to remarry, and in the next sixty years she ventures outside her family compound only three times. She...

"Indian American journalist Smita has returned to India to cover a story, but reluctantly: long ago she and her family left the country with no intention of ever coming back. As she follows the case of Meena--a Hindu woman attacked by members of her own village and her own family for marrying a Muslim man--Smita comes face to face with a society where tradition carries more weight than one's own heart, and a story that threatens to unearth the painful...

Ever since That Night, the residents of Khaufpur have lived a perilous existence. Their world is poisoned. Nobody has received compensation or help for the chemical leak, least of all Animal, as he is known, whose spine twisted at a young age, leaving him to walk on all fours. Though he inhabits a dark kind of half-life, he knows what love is. He has long harboured feelings for his friend Nisha but since she is enamoured of his friend Zafar he cannot...

Krisha, a ten year old boy, has been abandoned in Bombay by his mother. He tries to earn money to go home while he lives in the streets.

Tells the story of a family that has been uprooted by the Partition of India and come to depend on its eldest daughter, the self-sacrificing Neeta. She watches helplessly as her own hopes and desires are pushed aside time and again by those of her siblings and parents, until all her chances for happiness evaporate, leaving her crushed and ailing.