Book excerpt: The celebrated Hindi novelist Vishwanath is heartbroken by the recent loss of his son in a car accident. The tragedy breaks a long dry spell and spurs him to write a novel set in the household of Lala Motichand in the early decades of the twentieth century. It follows the lives of the wealthy lala and his three sons: self-confident Dinanath, the true heir to Motichand's mercantile temperament; lonely Diwanchand, uninterested in business and steeped in poetry; and illegitimate Makhan Lal, a Marx-loving schoolteacher relegated to the periphery of his father s life. And in an illuminating act of self-reflection, Vishwanath, the son of a cook for a rich sethji, also tells the story of the lala's personal servant, Mange Ram, and his son, Parsadi. Fatherhood, brotherhood and childhood, love, loyalty and poetry all come to the fore as sons and servants await the lala's oncoming demise, against the devotional landscape of the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas. By writing about mortality and family, Vishwanath confronts the wreckage of his own life while seeking to make sense of the new India that comes into being in the first half of the twentieth century. Spellbinding and penetrating, Half the Night Is Gone raises questions of religion, literature and society that speak to our fractured times.