Excerpt from A State of Freedom by Neel Mukherjee, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

'Here, look, babu, babu-sa'ab, look ...' A button was pressed and a toy came to mechanical life, emitting tinny games-arcade sounds of shooting guns as it teetered forward.

A man came up uncomfortably close and, with the dexterity of a seasoned cardsharp, fanned open a deck of sepia prints of famous Indian historical buildings and temples. A picture of a naked woman appeared and disappeared so quickly that it could well have been the prestidigitator's illusion. He was shocked; didn't the man see that he had a small child with him? Or did he not care?

The surrounding gardens, well tended by Indian standards, shone in the white-gold light of the January afternoon, yet, looked at closely, all that riot of cannas and marigolds and manicured grass lawns could not really disguise their irredeemable municipal souls. There was the typical shoddiness – straggly borders; lines that could not keep straight; a certain patchiness to the planting, revealing the scalp of soil through the thinning hair of vegetation; the inevitable truculence of nature against the methodising human hand ... and underpinning all this amateurish attempt at imposing order and beauty he could feel, no, almost see, what a battle it was to keep the earth, wet and dark now, from reverting to red dust in the obliterating heat of the Northern Plains in the summer. He bought tickets and entered the great courtyard of the Diwan-i-Am. The world transformed – in the burnished gold of the winter afternoon sun, the umber-red sandstone used for the whole complex at Fatehpur Sikri seemed like carved fire, something the sun had magicked out of the red soil in their combined image and likeness.

He looked at his son, expecting to see a reflection of his own wonder on the child's face, but all he could discern in that mostly unreadable expression was ... was what? Boredom? Across another courtyard, all blazing copper in the light, lay the palace buildings. He backtracked to consult the map etched on to a stone block towards the entrance, but with no reference point to indicate 'You are here' he felt confused.

While retrieving the camera and the guidebook from his backpack, he said to his son, 'Stay still for a moment, don't run off. We'll go to all those beautiful little palaces, do you see?' By the time he had slung the camera around his neck and opened the guidebook to the correct page, he could tell that the boy was itching to run across the courtyard. He tried to keep an eye on him while skim-reading the relevant page. Yes, he had found it – this must be the Mahal-i-Khas, the private palaces of Akbar. His head bobbed back and forth, like a foraging bird's, from page to surrounding environment. When he had established beyond any doubt that the two-and-a-half-storeyed building on the left, which had a touch of incompleteness to it, was Akbar's private apartments, he caught hold of his son's hand and made to enter the building.

But he had been spotted leafing through the travel-guide, his hesitation and momentary lostness read shrewdly. A man materi­alised behind him and began to speak as if he was in the middle of a talk he had been giving: 'The recesses in the ground floor that you will see were meant for his books and papers and documents ...'

He wheeled around. The sun caught his eyes and dazzled him. All he could make out was a dark, almost black, sharply pointed face, a human face on its way to becoming a fox's; or was it the other way round?

'If you go up to his sleeping chamber, the khwabgah, on the top floor,' the man continued, 'you will see fine stone latticework screens along the corridor leading to the women's quarters, the harem. These jaalis protected the women from the public gaze as they went back and forth from the khwabgah.'

The man spoke with practised fluency. If he was trying to advertise his skills as a guide to get hired, then there was nothing in his manner or his speech that betrayed this purposive bent. If anything, he seemed almost oblivious of his presence and his child's.

Excerpted from A State of Freedom: A Novel by Neel Mukherjee. Copyright © 2017 Neel Mukherjee. With permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.