Sikandar Chowk Park — Neelum Saran Gour

After a bomb blast rips through Sikandar Chowk Park, Allahabad, killing fifty-seven people, a journalist pieces together the lives of eleven of the dead from the heap of mutilated bodies.

Among them a self-effacing music teacher who won''t go abroad on a fellowship because of his family of stray dogs; an Anglo-Indian widow coping with the knowledge of her husband''s infidelity thirty-five years ago; a precocious ''problem'' child; a firebrand feminist confronting the sexual misdemeanours of her friend''s husband; and a young Dalit woman who defies her marriage and her society and enters into a relationship with an unemployed Brahmin boy-all ordinary people leading ordinary lives in a quintessential mofussil Indian township.

Neelum Saran Gour''s vibrant prose conjures up a multitude of characters involved in a maze of relationships, and the dynamics of events which propel them to Sikandar Chowk Park on the fateful day. In the process, she crafts a talk at once poignant and witty, which ingeniously addresses contemporary issues of communal and caste prejudices, bigotry and faith, forgiveness and redemption.