Twenty-eight essays on going back.

To a hall at Presidency College, to watch his father defend a doctoral thesis at an age when most men have stopped explaining themselves. To Tirupati after ten years. To Udaipur, to say goodbye. To a Lego set first built by a boy who no longer exists.

The Thread Keeps Accounts collects eighteen months of writing, published as it was finished on a blog nobody was asked to read. The essays move between Sangam poetry and a broken printer; between the merchant Kovalan speaking from the far side of an epic and a woman waiting at a level crossing that was never built for her; between a mother's kitchen in Chennai and a glass bridge over three oceans at Kanyakumari.

They are arranged in five parts — The House I Came From, Going Back, The City and Its Small Repairs, What the Language Left Us, The Faces on the Screen — with a coda at the southern tip of the country.

What holds them together is the oldest instrument ever used for keeping a record: a thread with knots in it.

156 pages. Twenty-eight photographs by the author.