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

It was better outside – the relative darkness inside had, oddly, unnerved him. But the pressure of tourism was relentless, bullying. Surely they hadn't come all this way to stand in the sun and look at pretty buildings from a distance, when they could be inside them, poring over the details, going into every room of every palace, absorbing what the guidebook had to say about each and then re-looking, armed with new knowledge?

In the strange and beautiful five-storeyed panch mahal, each ascending floor diminishing in size until there was only a small kiosk surmounted by a dome on top – eighty-four, fifty-six, twenty, twelve and four columns on each level, respectively, his guide told him – arches between columns took the place of walls and he had been glad of the light and the breeze that came in unimpeded.

Outside once again, he noticed the squares marked on the courtyard, with a raised stone seat at the centre of the regular cross formed by the squares, and pointed them out to his son. 'Do you see the squares in the four directions, making the four arms of a big plus-sign?' he asked, tapping a few with his feet and indicating the rest with his pointing hand, 'Here, and here, and this ... do you see?'

The boy nodded.

'Show me the plus-sign then,' he asked.

The child danced around, stamping on each square, repeating his father's 'Here ... and here, and this one ...'

'Good,' he said. 'Do you know what they are for?'

'This square has X on it, and this one,' the boy said, jumping on each of them.

'Yes, so they do. Do you know what these squares are doing here?'

The boy shook his head and looked at him expectantly.

'This is a board game, like Ludo or chess. It's called pachisi. Instead of having a small board at the centre, which is surrounded by a circle of a few players, they had a big one marked out permanently in this courtyard.'

His son stared silently, as if digesting the information.

'But do you know why it's so big? I mean, so much bigger than a Ludo or a chess board?' He was hoping the child was not going to ask what Ludo was: why should the ubiquitous board game of the endless afternoons and evenings of his Calcutta childhood mean anything to an American boy? That worn question of his son's disconnection with his father's culture reared its head again, but weakly. He pushed it down, easily enough, and offered the answer to the question he had asked, by reading an excerpt from a nineteenth-century book quoted in his travel-guide: 'The game of pachisi was played by Akbar in a truly regal manner, the Court itself, divided into red and white squares, being the board, and an enormous stone raised on four feet, representing the central point. It was here that Akbar and his courtiers played this game; sixteen young slaves from the harem, wearing the players' colours, represented the pieces, and moved to the squares according to the throw of dice. It is said that the Emperor took such a fancy to playing the game on this grand scale that he had a court for pachisi constructed in all his palaces ...'

Again, that expression of wide-eyed nothingness on the boy's face. He explained the quotation slowly, in simple words, pointing to the squares and the stone seat, to spark some interest in the boy. The child's face lit up for an instant. He hopped from one square to another, then another, finally sat, cross-legged, on one of them and chirped, 'Am I a piece in this game?'

'You could be,' he laughed.

'What will happen when you throw the die? Will my head be chopped off? In one clean stroke?'

Before he could answer, a voice behind him intervened sharply, 'Get that child out of that square!'

He wheeled around. It was the man with the face of a fox. His eyes glittered. The moustache looked animal too.

'Don't you know it's bad luck to have children sit in these squares? Do you know what happened here? Don't you know the stories?'

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.