Catagory: Fiction

Samar, a young man of limited means, moves to Benares, the ancient city of learning, to lose himself in the world of books. There he meets Rajesh, a poor student, and Catherine, a young French woman, who shows him a very different side of his own country—and self. A resonant and ambitious novel, The Romantics is both the story of a sentimental education and of the widening fault lines within contemporary India.

In the eighteenth century, Justin Aloysius Trotter, or the Great Trotter, tumbles earthward to his death while surveying his vast lands and admiring his wealth from a hot air balloon. Two centuries later, the Seventh Trotter, Eugene Aloysius, narrates the epic story of a family at the fraying ends of its past glory.
Laced with verses, advertisements, journal entries, elegies, quotations and learned interpolations, The Trotter-Nama is the chronicle of seven generations of Trotters as they struggle to hold on to their shifting identities. They are Indian at lunch and British at dinner; eat curry with a dessert spoon and dessert with a teaspoon. Over the years, the expanding clan of Trotters produces soldiers, artists, poets, politicians-even a dhoti-wearing nationalist. As their excesses slowly turn to improvidence and the family chateaux is turned into a hotel, their increasing numbers and declining fortunes strain against a rapidly changing country.
Allan Sealy’s epic comedy of manners about Britain and India’s motley offspring is as much a treat today as it was thirty years ago.

Plain, unmarriageable Uma has failed to outgrow her childhood home, with its bittersweet treats of puri-alu and barfi. Overprotected and starved for a life, she is smothered by her overbearing parents, successful sister Aruna, and Arun, the family’s disappointment of a son. Across the world in Massachusetts, where Arun has gone as a student, family life in an American suburb is bewilderingly different. The Pattons, who he lives with, appear strange and terrible. The women don’t appear to cook at all, though they stuff their shopping carts; the men barbecue huge chunks of meat; their daughter binges on innumerable candy bars. Increasingly, Mrs Patton is desperate to be a vegetarian, like Arun. But what Arun wants most is to be invisible. Moving from a traditional Indian household to an American one, Fasting, Feasting is a powerful exploration of hunger and plenty, and one of Anita Desai’s most socially acute novels.

Gone are the days when Nanda Kaul watched over her family and played the part of Vice-Chancellor’s wife. Leaving her children behind in the real world, the busier world, she has chosen to spend her last years alone in the mountains in Kasauli, in a secluded bungalow called Carignano. Until one summer her great-granddaughter Raka is dispatched to Kasauli – and everything changes. Nanda is at first dismayed at this break in her preciously acquired solitude. Fiercely taciturn, Raka is, like her, quite untamed. The girl prefers the company of apricot trees and animals to her great-grandmother’s, and spends her afternoons rambling over the mountainside. But the two are more alike than they know. Throughout the hot, long summer, Nanda’s old, hidden dependencies and wounds come to the surface, ending, inevitably, in tragedy. Marvellous yet restrained, Fire on the Mountain speaks of the past and its unshakable hold over the present.

While their parents went to parties at Delhi’s Roshanara Club, the children of the Das family brought themselves up, reading Byron, listening to the gramophone, and watching over sad, alcoholic Mira masi. Many years later, the youngest, Tara—now a mother of two—has returned from America to the scene of her unusual, lonesome childhood.

Here, as always, is her sister Bim, doggedly single college-lecturer and caretaker of all. In her presence, Tara sinks into the blissful torpor of home, at once her dreamy old self but careful as ever around her older sister. For at the heart of this reunion are numerous tensions: Tara feels the persistent guilt of having, like the others, abandoned Bim; their autistic brother Baba is increasingly unquiet; and Bim has not spoken to their other brother, Raja, for years and refuses to go to his daughter’s wedding.

Clear Light of Day is vintage Anita Desai, a novel as wonderfully contemplative as a cup of afternoon tea.