Nuagarh has had the same winner for twenty-two years. Then the sitting MLA drives off a canal bridge in a straight line, in the rain, on the eve of the day he was due to tell the Election Commission something. Anusuya Mohanty is sent to run the by-election. She expects two weeks of paperwork and wet roads. She finds an electoral roll with a hundred-and-nineteen-year-old woman on it, a clerk who will not look her in the eye, and a rice mill owner who brings her dalma in a steel tiffin and seems to know what she likes to eat. Lalatendu Hota has fed this district for thirty years. He has never raised his voice. He has never needed to. Fifteen days. Two hundred and sixty polling booths. One roll that somebody has already printed. In a country where everyone is counted, the most dangerous thing to be is a name that someone has decided to cross out.