A single fixed point (a secondhand bookseller at a busy crossing) can serve as the hub through which otherwise unconnected urban strangers circulate and intersect. The place itself, not any shared purpose or community, is what links lives that would never otherwise touch.
Jehangir Rangoonwalla runs a secondhand bookstall at Connaught Place in Delhi, dispensing tea, chess games and homespun philosophy alongside books, and his customers' separate obsessions form the novel's interlocking stories. He functions less as a merchant than as a confessor and fixed observer around whom the city's drifters orbit.
Each character is rendered through a single consuming fixation (collecting, a lost lover, a medical cure, aphrodisiacs) rather than through backstory or psychology. Treating a person's compulsive object of desire as the key to who they are lets a portrait be built from what they chase instead of where they came from.
The book locates its emotional truth in the margins and underbelly of urban life: the quacks, collectors, misfits and the sexually and romantically frustrated, rather than in official or respectable spaces. It asserts that the texture of a modern Indian city is best read through its small private cravings and failures, not its public institutions.