The story opens with the ignominious departure of Chellam, an eighteen-year-old servant who had arrived a year earlier to work at the Big House at Ipoh.
The narrative swings back and forth from 1899 when Appa’s grandfather sets sail from Tamil Nadu to seek work in Malaysia; to 1959 when he buys the Big House from a dyspeptic mine-owning Scotsman; to the present day, as six-year-old Aasha, eleven-year-old Suresh, and their ill-matched parents Amma and Appa, oversee the departure of Chellam.
Samarasan displays a first-time novelist’s classic tendency to mistake accumulation of detail with narrative richness, resulting in the telling details—the ones that you can delight in, that give these lives their texture and colour—being lost in the landslide of irrelevant minutiae.
The three-generation-family-saga has been—let’s face it—done to death. So has linguistic quirkiness, picaresque romps through colonial history, the dysfunctional family seen through the eyes of a young child. By the time you get to the incest, around pg 300, the reader’s overriding emotion is to merely wonder, with a sigh, what took her so long. 4
