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

The sun had blinded him so he turned his head away, both to face his son, whom he was afraid to let out of his field of vision for any duration, and to signal to the man that he was not going to be needing his services. The buildings that lay in the slanted shade were an earthen matt pink. Elsewhere, the red sandstone that caught the sun burned a coppery-gold. When he turned around to see if he had shaken off the tout, there was no one to be seen.

In the rooms on the ground floor of the emperor's private quarters he was held by the flaky painted decorations depicting flowers and foliage; these faded ghosts still managed to carry a fraction of their original life-spirit. They had been touched up, restored, but with a brutal mugger's hand. From the vantage point of the courtyard, the interior had looked poky and pitch-dark and he had wondered about the smallness of the chambers and, correspondingly, the physical stature of those sixteenth-century people: did they have to huddle and stoop inside? Was it light enough to see things in there during the daytime? Why were there no doors and windows? What did they do for privacy? And then, the crowning question: did he know just too little about the architectural and domestic history of the Mughals?

Now that they were inside, the idea that the rooms were cramped somewhat diminished but the feeling that they were, or could be, dark remained. Was it something to do with his vision, or from having just come in from the brightness outside? He blinked several times. The interior seemed to shrink, expand and then shrink again, as if he were in the almost imperceptibly pulsating belly of a giant beast. In the pavilion at the top, where Akbar used to sleep, faded frescoes, nibbled away by time with a slow but tenacious voracity, covered the walls. But the fragments seemed to be under some kind of wash; a protective varnish, perhaps, but it had the effect of occluding them under a milky mist. A winged creature, holding an infant in front of a cave in a rockface, looked down at him from above a doorway. It looked as if it had been assembled from large flakes of once-coloured dandruff. His heart boiled against the cage of his chest.

'Baba, look, an angel!' the child said.

He closed his eyes, gripped his son's hand, turned his face away, then back again and opened his eyes. The angel continued to stare at him. There was intent in those eyes, and even the very first touch of a smile in those delicately upturned corners, as if Persian artists had brought forth a Chinese angel. He shut his eyes again; the face of the fox-guide, accompanied by shifting confetti-links of floaters, flickered across his retina.

Outside, the courtyard, large enough to be the central square in a city where the crowd congregates for the beginning of a revolution, held scattered groups of colourfully clothed visitors. The spiky phalanx of red cannas blazed in their plots. A square stone platform, bordered by jaalis, rose from the centre of a square rectangular pool, filled with stagnant water, virulent green with algae. Four raised narrow walkways, bisecting each side of the square, led to the platform. The musical rigour that the Mughals had brought to the quadrangular form struck him again; he riffled through his guidebook to read something illuminating about this pool, Anup Talao.

'Baba, can we go to the middle? There are lanes,' the boy said.

'I don't think we are allowed to,' he said, then tried to distract him by summarising the few lines on the feature: 'Look, it says here that musicians used to sit in the centre there, on that platform, and perform concerts for the emperor and his court.' After a few beats of silence, he added, 'Wasn't that interesting?', hearing his own need to keep the boy engaged fraying with exhaustion.

'Why aren't we allowed to?'

'Well,' he thought for a second or two, 'if people were allowed in, we would see a lot of tourists here walking in and out, posing on the platform, taking pictures ... but there's none of that, do you see?'

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.