A healer who once drew venom from snakebites ends her days wandering the lanes of her village, begging strangers for a box of matchsticks. A well-off woman from Kolkata rings the doorbells of strangers’ homes, posing as a saleswoman to uncover the identity of a woman she is looking for. A professor of English literature walks into a room on his father’s property and rapes the newly-wed bride of his father’s employee, all the while thinking of Coleridge’s poetry.

Unclaimed takes the reader into the stories we overhear and, sometimes to our horror, glimpse in our own family albums. Each begins with a single frame of a life in motion, then opens into the peculiar angularities of a person’s reality. These stories scratch at the visible surface in their quest for the shades of truth beneath, which is complex and disturbingly human. In between lies a whole universe, shifting with the chronology of human fatigue, hypocrisy, and conflict, through which the characters try to balance, to reconcile, and to wear the mask of the normal.