His kurta and dhoti were an austere white, his waistcoat a lawyerly black. He had smoked a pipe all evening and held one polite leaf cup of toddy that he had only pretended to sip.
His long nose struck out, arrow-like, beneath deep-set eyes. The drums, the monotonous twanging of a stringed instrument, and loud singing obliterated the sounds of the forest.Ī man with a thin, frown-creviced face topped by dark hair combed back from his high forehead sat as still as a stone image in their midst, in a chair that still had its arms but had lost its backrest. Smoke curled from cooking fires and tobacco.
Men in loincloths and women in saris had begun to dance barefoot, kicking up dust. In the warm glow of fires that lit the clearing at the centre of straw-roofed mud huts, palm-leaf cups of toddy flew from hand to hand. He prospers in the turbulent years after Partition, but his thoughts stay with his home, with Bakul, with all that he has lost-and he knows that he must return. As Mukunda and Bakul grow, their intense closeness matures into something else, and Mukunda is banished to Calcutta. Confined in a room at the top of the house, a matriarch goes slowly mad her husband searches for its cause as he shapes and reshapes his garden. Bakul, a motherless daughter, runs wild with Mukunda, an orphan of unknown caste adopted by the family. A widower struggles with his love for an unmarried cousin. On the outskirts of a small town in Bengal, a family lives in solitude in their vast new house. “This is why we read fiction at all” raves the Washington Post: Family life meets historical romance in this critically acclaimed, “gorgeous, sweeping novel” ( Ms Magazine) about two people who find each other when abandoned by everyone else, marking the signal American debut of an award-winning writer who richly deserves her international acclaim.
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