In writing about the times of the Buddha, Bani Basu composes a new Jataka, the traditional format in which the tales of the different births of the Buddha were written down. In this Jataka-as-a-novel, she grapples with history and the revolutionary ideas of the Buddha, who suggested new ways of living, new political formations, of a major change in belief, indeed, in thinking about God or the absence of one. Delving into history and biography, Sanskrit and Pali, her novel is intriguingly contemporary, though set in the sixth century BC