After years of absence, American travel writer Max Gate returns to Bengal, to the beach home of his longtime friend, the businessman Byron Mallick. The occasion is a funeral: for Damini, fervent investigative journalist and founder of a women's shelter, with whom Max once collaborated, until ultimately she scorned the book he wrote on their work together. It is irrefutable that Byron Mallick donated not milk, but milk adulterated with chalk, to the...