They pass each other in the rain. They stand shoulder to shoulder under the same drumbeat. They walk the same bridge at the same minute, in opposite directions. And in the whole of one monsoon-to-Puja season in Kolkata, they never meet.
Dev Verma is a reclusive data-recovery engineer who opens a decades-old drive and finds a conspiracy to erase the city's heritage houses. Ananya Joshi is a professor of heritage studies whose mentor has vanished, and who is being told, in anonymous messages, to look at the deeds and not the demolitions. A courteous man in a grey suit is following them both. And in the margins of the books at a College Street bookshop, two strangers begin to write to each other.
A suspenseful, atmospheric and deeply moving novel of near-misses, secrets and a love that lives in the space between two lines of handwriting, Same Shelf, Different Hour is a story for every age, and for anyone who has ever almost met.