Across the Lakes Amal Chatterjee

In the vast city of Calcutta, four very different lives Meena, a pretty middle-class girl, her head full of books and marriage; Putul, idle, amiable scion of the moneyed upper classes, too lazy to notice anything much; John, a young Scotsman in search of his family's Indian 'roots'; and Choto, the slum-dwelling son of a humble servant, making an increasingly perilous job of staying alive.
In a place where poverty and extravagance co-exist, these four young people lead parallel lives, inextricably linked to one another by family, proximity, and sheer chance, but for the most part oblivious to the complex web of fate that ties their destinies together. It takes the events of one dry season to bring them together with catastrophic consequences.