An unusual story that starts as a modern fairytale and ends with the grimness of this world, 'The Last Song of Dusk' takes the readers through a roller coaster ride of love, loss, fate and acceptance of life as it comes. The novel opens as Anuradha leaves Udaipur to meet her prospective husband Vardhaman. The story then continues to tell us about her tryst with 'kismet' When she enters Dwarika house, the house at their first encounter had told about the Mischief it could unravel with unpassioned deviousness - the death of her first son, Mohan. After the arrival of Divi-bai, a eyelash-less had who made a 'malicious fitting' to the Gandharva family, Anuradha learns that love and loathing, joy and distress, quietness and noise, all eventually blur and one is left wondering where one started and the other ended. Things drastically change after the death of Mohan when Anuradha found that contrary to what others said, Death was not deadening at all; rather it was a dynamic creature whose black fragrance, whose concrete stillness seeped into the wood of the furniture, the linen of the bed, the flowers in the vases; it was everywhere as omnipresent as its only sibling, Life. On the other hand, quietness found its way into Vardhaman: not merely as a baffling reticence but the species of heavy silence one finds in the folded white wings of Death's seraphim. And all these do not change even after arrival of their second son Shloka who at an age of four could be described as an ascetic with an amazing genius for melancholy.
The readers are then introduced to Nandini - a-walk-on-water, soul painting, beedi-smoking girl who saw people for who they were and who, at the age of seven had wisely concluded, 'Life is pathetic'. The fate of all these characters unravel in an old villa of 1920s' - Dariya Mahal, a monstrous house who licked up all its inmates with its deep, morbid sorrow that was too sacred for it to lose.
