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

He was sufficiently annoyed by the man's hectoring tone to protest: 'Show me a sign that says children are not allowed on this board. It's part of the courtyard, anyone can walk on it. And who are you, anyway?'

'Look around you – do you see any children?'

Almost involuntarily, he turned around: to his right, the extraordinary symmetry of the detached building of the Diwan-i-Khas; behind him, the jewel-box of the Turkish Sultana's house; and in the huge courtyard on which these structures stood, not a single child to be spotted. All those colourfully dressed tourists he had seen earlier seemed to have vanished. There were one or two to be seen standing in the shapely arches of buildings or colonnaded walkways, but there was no one in the courtyard and certainly no children. Incredulous, he turned a full circle to be sure he had let his gaze take in everything. No, no children. The man too was gone. There was a sudden, brief vacuum in his chest; then the sensation left.

'D-did you see the ... the man who was just here? Where did he go?' he asked his son.

The boy shook his head.

'But ... but you saw him speaking to me, didn't you?' He was nearly shouting.

'Speaking? What?' the boy asked.

Of course, the child wouldn't have understood a word; the man had been speaking in Hindi.

'B-but ... but ...' he began, then that futility was inside him again, making him feel weightless.

He extended his hand to his son and caught the warm little palm and fingers in his grip and wanted to hold on to them to moor himself and at the same to scrunch them, so fierce was the wave of love and terror that suddenly threatened to unbalance him. He took the boy and ran into the Turkish Sultana's house but was blind to the ways craftsmen had made every available surface blossom into teeming life with dense carvings of gardens, trees, leaves, flowers, geometric patterns, birds, animals, abstract designs. At another time he would have been rooted to the spot, marvelling, but now his senses were disengaged and distant and all he saw was the frozen work of artisans and their tools. In one of the lower panels, the heads of the birds of paradise sitting on trees had been destroyed. An animal, crouching below, had been defaced too, making it look much like the lower half of a human child, decapitated in the act of squatting; it brought to mind ritual sacrifice. A small thrill of repulsion went through him. The mutilated carvings had the nature of fantastical creatures from Bosch's sick imagination; left untouched, they would have been simply beautiful. Then the dimness started to play havoc with his perception. Shapes and colours got unmoored and recoalesced in different configurations. It was like discovering a camel smoking a pipe, formed in clouds in the sky, shift and morph into a crawling baby held in the cradling trunk of an elephant, except there was no movement here, no external change of shape to warrant one thing becoming another.

He forced himself to read a few lines from the relevant section of his guidebook but they remained locked too; signs without meanings. He asked his son, 'Do you like what you see? Can you tell me what these are?' He couldn't make the words come out animated.

The boy shook his head.

'All right, let's go look at something else.' No amount of beauty could counter the permanent twilight of the interiors.

The baize-table lawns and the begonia shrubs radiated light like a merciless weapon. A ripple passed through the blazing froth of bushes, as if the vegetation was shuddering at his presence. Almost dragging his son along, he ran towards a small, perfectly formed building, standing in the flag of shade that it flung on the pied stones of the courtyard. Mariam's House, the guidebook said. It was the colour of something that had been sluiced indelibly in blood in its distant past. Under the stone awning three-quarters of the way up, the ventilation slots – surely they were too small to be windows? – looked like blinded eyes, yet the house gave the effect of looking watchful. It struck him then, suddenly, a feeling that the walls and stones and cupolas and courtyards were all, as one organism, watching him and his son.

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.