In a bustling town in Punjab before the Partition, a sickly but restless child longs to play with the neighbourhood youngsters. He is constantly thwarted by his mother's anxious need to coddle him at home. When not being punished for using foul language, he is fighting with his siblings or being teased by the servant. As time passes and his curiosity of the wider world deepens, he discovers that his father is not invincible, that his long-held derision of girls vanishes with the first bloom of sexual longing and that the playground battles of old are no match for life's cruelties. Boyhood is a haunting portrait of the inescapable agonies and unfathomable desires of childhood by one of Hindi literature's most towering luminaries.