During a visit to New Delhi for a reading of the book, Mukherjee readily admitted there were similarities between him and his main protagonist Ritwik. Both he and Ritwik are Bengali and stay in Oxford and both have lost their parents. But, unlike him, Ritwik is an isolated, lonely and fragile creature who is constantly haunted by memories of his mother meting out brutal punishments to him for small mistakes. This abuse leaves him with a self-destructive streak. “I am nothing like that. I had a happy childhood and loved my parents,” says the writer who also reviews books for London newspapers.

He looks 27, wears his Oxbridge attitude lightly and makes the controversial sound conversational. “I think all of Tagore’s novels are flawed. I think the novel is flawed as a genre,” he insists, dramatically. And unlike most first-time writers who started scribbling stories as children, Mukherjee only took up fiction during his PhD at Cambridge in 1999. “That too because I was absolutely disillusioned with the course,” he says. Past Continuous was born after a creative writing course at the University of East Anglia in 2000-01.

In the novel, Mukherjee experiments with the cross-cultural genre popularised by Zadie Smith in White Teeth, bringing Ritwik in contact with a senile old English woman called Anne Cameron, who had journeyed to India during the days of the Raj. Cameron is the writer’s favourite character and he is so sentimental about her that he changed the first draft of the novel in which she dies. “I just could not bear to kill her. She has already suffered so much, having lost both her children. And though I feel for children who don’t have parents, I sympathise many times over for parents whose children have died,” he says.

Mukherjee also packs in issues of illegal aliens, corporal punishments, mother-child bonds, gay relationships, Rajput history and even a tale of Miss Gilby, a marginal character from Tagore’s novel Gharey Bairey. He deftly holds together the bulging narrative, managing to change his writing style from 19th century Indian Victoriana, when he talks of Cameron, to contemporary English while recounting Ritwik’s tale.