Home Overview
Tender and funny, Manju Kapur's third novel is an engrossing story of family life across three generations of Delhi shopkeepers When Nisha - plump, pretty and fair - is born to Sona after many miscarriages and much heartbreak ten years after her marriage, she is a much-desired child, welcomed by all the members of her business family - of a class whose carefully controlled lifestyle has been honed over generations to ensure prosperity in the marketplace. But her favoured status as the only daughter in the extended, middle-class Banwari Lal family is short-lived, dulled first by the birth of a younger brother and then by the hesitant signs of an individual personality�Angered by Nisha's preoccupation with schoolwork and her reluctance to do her share in the kitchen, the women of the family, fed on the revered Indian stereotype of selfless womanhood, are scathing enough. But when she transgresses all boundaries and makes the fatal mistake of falling in love with a boy from another community, who, predictably, leaves her for the girl his family wishes him to marry, they are merciless�Set in Karol Bagh, New Delhi's chaotic commercial colony crammed with residences and retail businesses, Manju Kapur's third novel, Home, is a sharply observed account of the relentless breaking-in of a young girl by her own family, until finally, stripped of any spirit and say, she is reconciled within its fold.
