The Second Hand

The Second Hand
by Nilesh Shrivastava

Mukund's father, restricted to a hospital bed by paralysis, asks his son for a favour. Mukund is to go to his hometown, Jalsaur – a small isolated North Indian town – to rescue his cousin, Uday from the mess he has got into with the police for assaulting a local college principal, Mr Siddiqui. Mukund takes up the task despite his past differences with Uday, and undertakes the journey to Jalsaur after twelve years. What he thought would be a two-day job, starts taking a life of its own, as he comes face-to-face with a town gradually getting politicised, and Uday standing bang in the middle of the process. He can no longer understand his cousin and the town that holds his childhood memories. For help, he just has one person to lean on – Siddiqui's daughter and his childhood friend, Sara.

Mukund soon begins to realise that the real reasons for his cousin's behaviour may not lie in Jalsaur, but in the tortured past of his family as it prospered and decayed over three generations. Some of the reasons point accusingly to his father, who left the town ages ago but never got around to severing his roots. Even before Mukund can tie the loose threads and take charge, the town is swept away by the strong headwinds of an event far away – the fall of the Babri Masjid and all the chaos that follows…

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