Kumar and Raman are champion kite-flyers, and Lakshmi makes superb burfis. The friends are blessed. They play by the Kaveri River. They learn about life from the peanut-seller. Most of all, they have each other. Then, a small mistake shatters this childhood idyll.

Snaking through the landscape of Tamil Nadu, Cool Cut follows the friends to Madras and into a house of eunuchs. These are shrill times too. Led by a superstar chief minister, MGR, the Tamil people are on the boil. They do not want Hindi. Tamil, after all, is the tongue of dreams.

In unblinking, lyrical prose, Sharad P. Paul brings alive the fabulous politics of caste, gender and language in south India. But Cool Cut, finally, is a human tale of painful severance and soaring, joyful redemption.