AND THE TEARS RUN DRY: A Novel

Merit itself is on sale.

Kiran Mondal studied, qualified and waited. The people who controlled her future wanted more than merit. After her suspicious death, the people who knew her must confront what they witnessed, what they withheld and what they allowed themselves to forget.

Across fifteen years in Kolkata, notebooks, photographs and recorded voices bring a journalist, a reporter, a shopkeeper, an artist, a teacher and a photographer into the same dangerous history. Candidates have paid for a future they cannot safely claim. Speaking may expose the people they most want to protect.

At home, the mothers who paid for coaching, food and rent have questions of their own. An appointment letter cannot explain a child's silence. Nor can a confession repair every betrayal.

AND THE TEARS RUN DRY is a social and psychological novel rooted in Bengali life, about public corruption, private shame and the difficult responsibility of telling what one knows.

For adult readers. Contains graphic depictions of sexual violence and coercion, sexual extortion and blackmail, threats, physical violence, and trauma.