India, Aug. 2 -- Whenever I've heard Pushpesh Pant speak about food, whether in a three-hour Aaj Tak radio episode or from beneath the shade of a tree in Sunder Nursery, I always picture him with a mouthful of gulab jamun, mid-sentence. It's as if he's chewing on metaphor and syrup at the same time, swaad lagaake. This is not a complaint. It's a particular talent of talking as though the act of remembering is indistinguishable from the act of tasting. Every corner in this book is filtered through desire, rumour, and what the body once wanted at 4 PM in 1972.

Pant's great trick is that he does not try to prove a thesis (which he admits early on), he makes the reader feel the absences around which his city has always existed. You can feel ...