Who is Ka? wonders the giant eagle as it encounters this name at the end of a Vedic hymn, hidden in the foliage of the Rauhina tree. Ka is the secret name of Prajapati, the progenitor from whom the thirty-three gods and countless humans descend. Soon, gods and humans would no longer care for him and would nearly forget him. Ka means "Who?" and is the final question one asks when all other questions have been posed. The remarkable achievement is that Ka is both a scholarly inquiry and a novel at the same time. It is something truly innovative, and such rarity in the world of books deserves to be celebrated, wrote Salman Rushdie.