Lessons in Forgetting When we first see Meera, she is a carefully groomed corporate wife with a successful career as a writer of cookbooks. Then one day her husband fails to come home after a party and she becomes responsible not just for her children but her mother and grandmother, and the running of Lilac House, their rambling old family home in Bangalore. Enter Professor J.A. Krishnamurthy, or JAK, a renowned cyclone studies expert, on a very different trajectory in life. In a bedroom in his house lies his nineteen-year- old daughter Smriti, left comatose after a vicious attack on her while she was on holiday at a beachside town. A wall of silence and fear surrounds the incident—the grieving father is helped neither by the local police, nor by her boyfriend in his search for the truth. Through a series of coincidences, Meera and JAK find their lives turning and twisting together, with the unpredictability and sheer inevitability of a cyclone. And as the days pass, fresh beginnings appear where there seemed to be only endings. About the Author: Anita Nair is the best-selling author of three novels, The Better Man, Ladies Coupe and Mistress, and a collection of literary essays, Goodnight and God Bless. Mistress was longlisted for the 2008 Orange Prize in the UK. It was also a finalist for the 2007 PEN/Beyond Margins Award in the USA and for the LiBeraturpreis 2007 in Germany. Anita’s books have been translated into twenty-nine languages around the world. She lives in Bangalore.