Blue Bedspread

In a house on a narrow Calcutta street, lit by the half-light of a yellow street lamp, lies a baby, one day old, wrapped in its hospital towel. In the next room sits a man, all alone, writing.

Who is this man, at once frightened and determined? What is he writing? Where has the baby come from an where will it go? Tonight, these questions will be answered when the man unravels the dark secrets he has carried all his life.

Painting scenes half-remembered, he flits between past and present, twisting facts to flesh out fiction. Slowly, as the night grows darker, the truth is revealed like a jigsaw falling into place piece by piece: two children who muffle their fears in the blueness of their bedspread; a mother who waves at a stranger across the street as she washes her son; the ghost of a dead baby whose footprints dot the bathroom floor; the mute roar from a cricket stadium.

In prose is breathtaking and precise, Raj Kamal Jha discovers love and hope behind the hidden violence twisted eroticism of an old city. The Blue Bedspread is a profoundly moving story of people who, through their imagination, find the escape they so desperately seek. It is a first novel of extraordinary power and rare humanity.