A generous man learns who his real friend is at eleven forty one at night. A marriage counselor forgets her own best advice. Six old friends keep taking the same smiling photograph. A father hears his own father’s anger come out of his mouth. A gifted singer keeps postponing his life. Two brothers stay silent for six years. A young widow saves five hundred rupees a month and never misses one.

Set in Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Lucknow and Pune, these seventeen stories follow ordinary people caught in the gap between the person they describe and the person their choices reveal. No villains. No lectures. No easy endings. Just the quiet moments when a life is decided.

And in the final chapter, stopped at a red light, the narrator turns the question on himself.

Read it slowly. Then look again.