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A devastating and powerful vision of a people defined by that most unquenchable human urge, the striving for a different life.Can we transform the possibilities we are born into? A State of Freedom wrests open the central, defining events of our century: displacement and migration. Five characters in very different circumstances -- from a domestic cook in Mumbai to a vagrant and his dancing bear -- find the meanings of dislocation and the desire to get more out of life.Set in contemporary India and moving between the reality of this world and the shadow of another, this novel of multiple narratives -- formally daring, fierce but full of pity -- asks the fundamental question: how does one imagine the ways one can live in the world, or even outside it?