Amit is a hotel manager in the Himalayan foothills, having left behind a buzzing corporate life in Mumbai after the death of his wife. In an alien land, surrounded by deodars, snowy peaks on the horizon, relentless rain, and hordes of menacing monkeys, he is confronted with the prospect of his own mortality. And at the centre of this and his other conundrums is one peculiar monkey with a maimed hand, who seems to have taken a permanent seat on a tree outside his living-room window and speaks to him without language: I can see you.

In a parallel world, an unnamed protagonist sits in a train, carrying her deceased father’s jhola and working maniacally on her manuscript—she seems to have no plans to deboard. She meets a curious cast of co-passengers, among them a monk who used to be a diamond merchant, a woman who has strange cosmic theories, a child who tells her stories that sound like fever dreams, and an ailing man. Brutally funny but also surprisingly tender, Karan Madhok’s surrealistic novel Monkey! is a meditation on journeys and destinations, nature and civilization, what it means to be recognized, and what it means to be free.