When The Mirror Shines

It was never lost. It was only covered.Pawan Mehta was born in a house that sang - a third-floor Mumbai flat loud with his father's film songs, his mother's evening prayers, and his grandmother Ba, who polished a small brass mirror every Saturday and told a boy in a hurry that nothing good is ever lost, only covered. Then the wind carried him out into the world: an engineering degree, a shipping career, the great ports of Singapore, Rotterdam, Dubai and London - where success gathered as quietly as dust, until a stranger's simple question about a book he had grown up beside left him with no answer at all.When the Mirror Shines follows one man's long road away from himself, and the longer road home. Moving between the trading floors of global shipping and the festivals, songs and verses of the India he left behind, it is a luminous novel about ambition and stillness, grief and equanimity, and the daily, unglamorous work of wiping the glass - because we are never in charge of the dust, only of the cleaning.