Githa Hariharan's fiction is wonderful-full of subtleties and humor and tenderness.

There are betrayals in war that are childlike compared with our human betrayals during peace. The new lovers enter the habits of the other. Things are smashed, revealed in a new light. This is done with nervous or tender sentences, although the heart is an organ of fire.

Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.

What night gave Rafael was a formlessness in which everything had a purpose. As if darkness had a hidden musical language.

How does this happen? To fall in love and be disassembled.

Women want everything of a lover. And too often I would sink below the surface. So armies disappear under sand. And there was her fear of her husband, her belief in her honour, my old desire for self-sufficiency, my disappearances, her suspicions of me, my disbelief that she loved me. The paranoia and claustrophobia of hidden love.

We are expanded by tears, we are told, not reduced by them.