India, Dec. 11 -- We have spent the last decade arguing about representation at the level of casting and cataloguing. Sunetra Gupta in her Memories of Rain worked 30 years ago on the slower problem of how thought sounds under pressure of migration, marriage, class, work. The book honours complexity, grants people their contradictions and then demands we track them. The new Westland Ashoka University edition returns her 1992 debut to readers.

Since winning the Sahitya Akademi award in 1996 for her first book, Gupta has written five more while teaching and working as a scientist. Those facts matter because Memories of Rain reads like the work of someone trained to observe systems of ecologies, epidemics, feedback loops and is unafraid to k...