About the Book

A letter buried in 1985, found in 2024. The question a child asked it has been quietly answered ever since.

In the winter after the gas, a boy in Bhopal buries a biscuit tin at the base of the one wall still standing in his lane. Inside the tin is a list of names, a few sentences in a child's careful hand, and a question he asks of whoever might one day find it.

Thirty-nine years later, a young architect kneels at that wall during a restoration survey. The soil is loose where it shouldn't be. She brushes it back the way you do when you sense something has been waiting.

The story moves between two cities and two generations: Bhopal in 1985 and Coimbatore in the present day. A mother lighting a lamp at the door every evening of one terrible winter. A teacher reading Premchand aloud in a Tamil classroom forty years later. A boy. A tin. A wall that didn't fall.

It is a story about names, and about the small, slow ways one person taking care can matter to another.

Thodi thodi. Little by little.

A story in a child's hands. A lamp in a lane. A voice at a door.

About the Author

Some stories arrive all at once. Anindya Ray's came thodi thodi, a little at a time, across forty years inside India's fashion industry. He scribbled them on napkins and in the margins of factory visits, and one day there were too many to ignore.

He has written two books on the business of fashion and draws the cartoon series Cutting Chai. This graphic novella is the first time those scribbles have turned into a story. He lives in Bangalore.