Ruhiton Kurmi has been in jail for seven years. Once a notorious Naxalite--a militant leftist revolutionary--he is now a withered shell; a man broken by police torture, racked with fevers and sores. The only way he can endure his life is by shutting out the past. But when Ruhiton is moved to a better jail and eventually freed, memories return to haunt him.

Ruhiton inevitably looks back upon his youth, his marriage, his home in the Himalayan foothills--and he remembers, too, the friends he has killed, the revolutionary colleagues he worked with, and the ideals he once believed in. Dark,...