The monsoons had arrived early in Mumbai, turning the city into a steamy, snarling beast. The air in the lawyer’s office on Nariman Point was frigid by contrast, a sterile bubble of conditioned air that smelled of old paper, lemon polish, and quiet, expensive decay. Arya Sharma sat stiffly in a leather chair that was too large for her, her damp cotton kurta sticking to her back. She is twenty-eight, an architectural historian who spent her days preserving fragments of the past, and she was about to inherit a living, breathing monument to a history she desperately wanted to forget.

“Your uncle was a man of… particular tastes,” Mr. Khanna, the family solicitor, said delicately, adjusting his spectacles. He slid a heavy manila folder across the vast teak desk. “And considerable wealth. His primary asset, and now yours, is ‘Vrindavan,’ the estate in Alibaug.”