Language is the warp and weft of a novel, but in Aatish Taseer's new novel, The Way Things Were, it's more than the material: It's a character. It may even be the hero. It's certainly, at the very least, the love interest.
The book follows Skanda, a student of Sanskrit, in the year after his father's death. As his mother, Uma, and his father, Toby, the Maharaja of Kalasuryaketu, have been long divorced after a passionate but brief marriage, Skanda must return to India to take care of the funeral arrangements. Toby, a renowned Sanskritist, imbued Skanda with his all-consuming love for the language, a romance that became the central one of Toby's life.
This taste of the wonders of what has been called the most perfect language doesn't exist in an ivory tower, however. As he continues his Sanskrit studies, Skanda must reckon with India's recent troubled history, his own parent's fractious marriage and the unacknowledged effects on his own childhood, and the inextricable complicity of the language he loves.
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