In this collection of essays, author Dushyant Rajan examines his life growing up in India in a military household with all the benefits of an upper-middle-class upbringing in post-colonial India. The essays describe Rajan's quest for heroic solutions to life's everyday problems, the compelling forces which obstruct him in his mission, his conclusions and resignations, and the beginning of a fondness for the life he left in India.

Knots, Gnarls and Rough Bark includes stories about the influence of important figures in his life: his maternal grandfather, Nana, an avowed Anglophile; his father, an officer in the Royal Air Force and the Indian Army from which he retired as an artillery Brigadier; and his mother, the Brigadier's wife.