As the Babri Masjid is razed in Ayodhya, brick by ancient brick, Ratan Oak stumbles upon a corpse at the Kipling House in Bombay. It is the beginning of an unraveling for him, of the submerged identity he has sought to suppress all his life: that of his great-grandfather, Ramratan Oak. Grappling with this tandem existence, Ratan realizes that the communal violence which consumes his city mirrors the turbulence it experienced in Ramratans times. For, concealed in the scientific discoveries of the plague epidemic of 1897 is the terrifying truth about the dead woman of Kipling House. A novel that perfectly balances character and pace, The Quarantine Papers dissects the compulsions of a hate that corrupts, as it trails a doomed love story from nineteenth century Bombay into our own day.

'An unforgettable story... Tells us of the passions and betrayals ignored by history' 6 December 1992. That first Sunday in December, while the Prime Minister of India dozed in Delhi, lesser things happened to lesser people in Bombay. Mohammad Yunus doused his clothes with kerosene and struck a match. Balkrishna More leaned out over the frenzied maha-aarti in the street below his balcony and jumped to his death. In a shuttered room in Girgaum, three old men waited for an answer. Enraptured, Radhika and Anwar were oblivious to the nasal BBC monotone on the tv screen. Who saw it first? It was there, happening right before them. A saffron ant crawled up the black dome. Then one more. Then another. Then a swarm of them. And then madness spilled every which way. In 303, Nandanvan Apartments, Ratan Oak looked out of the window and discovered he had been living in the wrong house all his life. An unforgettable story set in the turbulent years of 1992 and 1896, when the palimpsest called Bombay is overwritten with hate, and sometimes, redeemed by love, The Quarantine Papers tells of the passions and betrayals ignored by history.

To mitigate the risks posed by microbial threats of public health significance originating abroad, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) places small groups of staff at major U.S. airports. These staff, their offices, and their patient isolation rooms constitute quarantine stations, which are run by CDC's Division of Global Migration and Quarantine (DGMQ). Congress began to allocate funds in fiscal 2003 for the establishment of new quarantine stations at 17 major U.S. ports of entry that comprise airports, seaports, and land-border crossings. In a significant departure from the recent past, both the preexisting 8 quarantine stations and the new 17 are expected to play an active, anticipatory role in nationwide biosurveillance. Consequently, DGMQ asked the Institute of Medicine (IOM) to convene an expert committee to assess the present CDC quarantine stations and recommend how they should evolve to meet the challenges posed by microbial threats at the nation's gateways. DGMQ specifically requested "an assessment of the role of the federal quarantine stations, given the changes in the global environment including large increases in international travel, threats posed by bioterrorism and emerging infections, and the movement of animals and cargo." To conduct this assessment and provide recommendations, IOM convened, in October 2004, the Committee on Measures to Enhance the Effectiveness of the CDC Quarantine Station Expansion Plan for U.S. Ports of Entry. At the sponsor's request, the committee released the interim letter report Human Resources at U.S. Ports of Entry to Protect the Public's Health in January 2005 to provide preliminary suggestions for the priority functions of a modern quarantine station, the competences necessary to carry out those functions, and the types of health professionals who have the requisite competences (Appendix A). This, the committee's final report, assesses the present role of the CDC quarantine stations and articulates a vision of their future role as a public health intervention.

"Report of the Dominion fishery commission on the fisheries of the province of Ontario, 1893", issued as an addendum to vol. 26, no. 7.