There is a person in every family who is told last. For eight years, first in the back pages of a household ledger and then in six red account books bought one at each Diwali, Nandita Mehra kept an account of a family that told her nothing. She ruled columns for what was owed and what was received. She wrote one line a night about one other person and never rubbed out the ones she got wrong. Her diary crosses all five novels from a seat nobody thought to look at. A companion volume, not a sixth novel.
