Mukerian, 1956. A sleepy railway town in the Punjab doaba, where the day is measured by the shuttle to Jalandhar and the evenings by kathas in the temple courtyard.

Then, one cold winter morning, the body of Jogi — the beloved son of the town's most prominent family — is found under the railway turntable. Thanedaar Darshan Singh, a small-town policeman raised on Ibne Safi and Agatha Christie, finally has the case he has always dreamed of.

But in a town where everyone knows everyone, and honour is guarded more fiercely than life, every clue leads into somebody's courtyard — the dera of a powerful baba, a mango orchard with an abandoned stepwell, and the homes of the chandal chowkri, four inseparable friends who each have something to hide.

When a second body is found, Darshan Singh must draw the killer out from behind the gentility of small-town Punjab — before the town's fragile peace burns.

A murder mystery steeped in the sights, sounds and scandals of newly independent India — written by a son of Mukerian, about the town as it was.