‘As the writer grapples with emotions of anger, fear, pain, suffering, confusion, chaos, resistance and endurance, the novel moves from poignant to contrived, disturbing to formulaic, profound to crude, literary to raw, lyrical to macabre and real to phoney. In short it leaves the reader as enraged, confused and silenced as its narrator is, opening up, in turn, several interpretive possibilities. … he narrates his personal experience of a political event, without pontificating or taking sides. It is through his unsullied account of what he witnessed and endured that the writer seeks to remember his dismembered self. Writing, in this sense, is also a survival strategy for the writer …This safe haven is also the space where the ‘performative’ reality of the nation is preserved, unadulterated by ideological hues, a space which the readers like birds must turn to, to find a trace of their history and hence a space that allows the literary writer a serendipitous entry into the social, historical and political debates.’