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‘It will look beautiful,� said Ishvar with authority. ‘Just keep connecting patiently, Dinabai � that’s the secret. Ji-hahn, it all seems meaningless bits and rags, til you piece it together.�

This book is a long journey and I have a piece of advice to offer to those undertaking it: remember that it is the journey that matters. Whatever happens, all of it was your real life, every sunset you saw counts, every love you felt was true. I can either think this way, or hate the book and its author�

In the telling it is highly skillful, weaving many threads so deftly that none of the connections are arbitrary, and the introduction and integration of each new person is carefully and effectively done. I was never confused by the large cast. For myself I could take pointed lessons gently through Dina, in whose faults I saw my own. I saw precarious ways to make living above and beyond survival in this book, and though comparing my comparatively luxurious urban life with that of slumdwellers might seem ridiculous, I was painfully reminded of my own struggles in a city struck by a ‘housing crisis� enitirely created by the sensless structures of late capitalism

The book itself treads a fine balance between satire and naturalism in its characterisations, which edge from dramatisation into cartoonishness at times. Minor characters are even more susceptible to becoming caricatures, like Mrs Gupta the raving reactionary (but people surely do actually have thoughts like this, or the country I myself live in could not be the way it is right now). Perhaps there is something both true and exciting in Mistry’s suggestion that everyone can strike a pose and vanish into a stereotype, because all of these people have facets or moments that defy the stereotypes they sometimes project.

I would have made some clippings perhaps, but this story, though it has a core of modest, novelish size, has an epic sweep in its nameless Indian settings. The town Maneck hails from reminded me so sharply of The Inheritance of Loss that I urgently wanted to read that book again, while ‘the city by the sea� seems unintegrated, a patchwork of communities and nodes that only coaslesces into a settlement when characters travel across it. Indeed this is a book of many journeys, many crossings, many borders mapped and transgressed, physical, mental, moral, class-based, caste-based, faith-based, divisions are all thrown into question, and at times gleefully trampled. The strongest of the many political currents here may be that one; the will to reach across difference.

The Law is a grim, unsmiling thing. Not Justice, though. Justice is witty and whimsical and kind and caring.