Annual Leave

In August, Mumbai loses people. The trains stop. The roads go under. Half the city works from home and the other half cannot get in, and for four weeks nobody is where they said they would be. It is the one month of the year when a person can vanish and the weather will explain it for you. Inspector Kalpana Sathe is not the best detective in the building. She is the one who did not take leave. When she emails a missing man, he answers. I am currently out of office. I will respond on my return, 30 August. He is not the only one. Across the city, eleven people have switched on the same reply-from their own accounts, days before walking out of their own lives. Eleven people with nothing in common. A radiographer. A ticket examiner. A school attendance clerk. Nothing in common, except that every one of them signs the forms that prove other people exist. They are all due back on the thirtieth. None of them is coming. Kal has twenty-nine days to find out what they agreed to, who is still answering their mail, and why her own out-of-office has been switched on since the first of the month. Includes sixteen facsimile documents from the case file. A work of fiction. All characters, cases, records and documents in this book are invented. The documents reproduced within it were created for the novel and do not reproduce any actual form or record. Nothing in this book describes or implies any actual conduct by any real institution or person.