But, unlike him, Ritwik is an isolated, lonely and fragile creature 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 very much,” says the writer 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. “And that too because I was absolutely disillusioned with the course. I was embarrassed with my stories and hid these away,” he says. Past Continuous was born after a creative writing course at the University of East Anglia in 2000-2001.

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 Englishwoman called Anne Cameron, who had journeyed to India during the days of the Raj. Cameron is the writer's favourite character and he is sentimental enough about her to have 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 sympathize 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.