Myth is the smoke of history and as the years pass the smoke, which has hung for millennia over the Indus Valley civilisation is clearing. Trowel and brush investigation in the 1920s by Mortimer Wheeler and now scientific research, which relies on aerial photography and computer modelling, has confirmed that an early urban civilisation appeared in that area slightly before the Sumerian and Egyptian ones appeared.

Teams of scholars from every continent have confirmed that the Indus, and its daughter and cousin rivers, for about 1,400 years supported extensive urban settlements, which then disappeared, lost under inundations of mud and dust. In these river valleys, in terrains of clay and water under a relentless sun and cloud-free starry skies.

Mathematics, town planning, pharmaceuticals and philosophy flourished and then disappeared almost without trace. Papers on archaeological investigation are appearing but in Harappa, Shankar Kashyap provides a different service.

Instead of asking us to piece together a complicated scientific narrative about what lies on, or just under, the earth he does what a Vedic bard would have done he tells a story, which has the features of a rip roaring Bollywood film. His hero, predictably because Shankar Kashyap is a surgeon, is Upaas, a trainee doctor.

Upaas describes municipal government, pupilship with a yogi, exploding arrows, kingship, an attempt to re-route rivers with thought, a battle in a hidden ravine as a watching eagle hovers overhead, international trade and horsemanship. There is a doe eyed maiden who flirts in shallow water using her toes and a villain who seems to lack the virtue of rising early without complaint.

This novel is well grounded in 5000 years of Hindu literature but it has a modern slant. Today floods threaten, traders quarrel, religious niceties cause children to starve and wail, drone planes bomb weddings and an interrogatory Eagle hovers watching.

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