Smith, and then his son Terry, found they were just as snagged on Hindu’s damning wheel as their forebears had been for over 170 years, until the family finally managed to carry on to Australia.

The two of them thought they could ride belatedly to the rescue of Terry’s once little-she twin who was simply never handed over at the adoption ceremony those years before… especially since they discovered she had escaped being returned to sender at birth as some sort of yoni-assembled piece of mismanufacture. But they found themselves caught in the spokes of child rackets, caste delusions, and probes into the country’s female-gender issues that are only attached by wires to ultrasound machines.

Nandi Baba, the Kapalika priest, with his best-brandy Tantra practices, gave them hope of saying enough’s-enough, until his conjured Hag goddess, a-quiver sexually, came down upon them.

The book is set in Australia, India and Sri Lanka and is fictionally based on real events - and, most devastatingly, on even Indian Government statistics showing in many places mathematically-impossible discrepancies between official birth rates of boys over girls.