Bombay, August 1989. The monsoon will not stop, and the mills of Lalbaug have been dead for six years. Mangal Parab spent thirty-one years at a spinning frame. Now she climbs the stairs above a tea shop in Dhobi Talao with a steel tiffin and a single request: find her son. Datta Parab, union clerk, vanished on a dry July night. The police say he stole sixty-one thousand rupees and ran. Nargis Dastur used to write about men like the one who made that claim. She gave up the newspaper, kept the habit of asking one question too many, and does not take cases from strangers. She takes this one. A missing register. A watchman who heard a jeep. A developer with a very large cheque, and a hero of the strike whom the whole district would die for. Everyone in Lalbaug has a story about the night Datta disappeared. Only one of them is true. What do you do when the truth is something an entire neighbourhood has decided never to hear?