New Delhi, Oct. 17 -- Does every "Calcutta novel" draw on a set of familiar themes? Bhadralok polity. Proletariats of Presidency College who are secretly scions of capitalists. A mansion (always at the epicentre of drama and disputes). Upstairs-downstairs, bickering and meshing. Scandals and silencing. Tagore, Dylan, Mao. Are these tropes inescapable? Or can we call this assemblage a pastiche of a bygone Calcutta (now Kolkata) that conjures history like a pantomime?

It is hard to find definitive answers when it is a novel like Pia Ghosh-Roy's And I Am the Arrow. Our first introduction to Niyoti, grand dame of south Calcutta's Chatterjee Mansion, is as a woman who is upper-crust, elitist, fiercely protective of the sanctity of her Dostoye...