When at year’s end a schoolteacher asks her pupils to write an essay about their vacations over the summer, 12-year-old Zeenat turns the routine exercise into a daily exploration of her innermost thoughts. It is the dawn of a new millennium, and she’s coming of age in a politically unstable Mumbai that is still resolutely Bombay to her Muslim community. Though the world beyond her window is full of change, Zeenat spends long hours bored inside her family apartment, preoccupied with the cockroaches under the fridge, the pigeon's nest above the cupboard, and the shared bathroom in the hall. At night, she reads English books in the kitchen as she questions where she fits between languages in this post-colonial society. Beyond the boredom of her daily routine, her anxiety spikes as she must start following the religious dress codes for a girl her age. And her fear is palpable when a neighbour is kidnapped.
