The book opens with the daily routine of a confident fixer satisfied with the state of his floating faeces, flowing finances, and flying friends. It then narrates the story of an adroit networker leveraging her position for pecuniary benefits. A smug bureaucrat makes the ascendant dealmaker and descendent aristocrat work in tandem to make the arriviste fall in line. It is said that the upper-upper middle class with a modicum of education and adequate income are permanently afflicted with status anxiety. The dread of falling down, the fear of remaining in the same place, or the hunger to climb up creates chronic restlessness. It’s extremely difficult to narrate their banal lives in an arresting manner. But the author has seen Kathmandruids from close quarters as this class multiplied its net worth by bleeding the country dry. He tells some of their tales in English as she was speaking by those educated at convent schools of India and Nepal. The narrative is interspersed with commentaries about history, culture, society, politics, economy and contemporary affairs of the noughties. The ambitious enterprise of telling everything possible about interesting times of Kathmandu in a thin volume has made the novel slightly complex and it invites readers to engage with the book rather than flick through its pages. – CK LAL