The key-note is passion: Manjari and her father, whom we meet through his diaries and the memories of those who survive him, know what physical passion is. They pay a high price for their knowledge; their once-happy family, composed of the parents and two daughters, is destined to be destroyed by it. Yet passion is also what lights them from within. By the end of the story, they become, the pair of them, like two small lanterns twinkling against the night of oblivion that awaits all mortal beings. The novel is peppered with deaths and tragedy, but this warm and deeply human light saves it from being either morbid or tiresome.
Of course, there are certain elements in the story that I could have done without: the sister Malu’s story, for instance, has a tinselly, made-in-Bollywood denouement. Raman, the excruciatingly docile tenant, is submissive beyond the pale of manhood. The resolution of the property-dealer crisis is rather too convenient. What rings true, however, is the description of family life. The cameo of Manjari’s family is set against the sprawling mural of middle-class Indiana, its strengths as much as its suffocating cosiness. Deshpande strides past the familiar whipping-posts of home-grown family dramas, to write instead of outspoken individualism and characters who take stands on moral issues, of people who believe in ideas and idealism. She sets the reader free to explore the notion of being simply human rather than forever imprisoned behind the bars of caste, community and gender.
