The cultivation of love derived from kinds of people that should be together, is the initial spark and scene. Lata and family are characterized in the arranged marriage of her sister. Quickly it becomes about finding a suitable boy for Lata, and the narrative unfurls from this heart to characterize a number of suitors and seemingly peripheral components, many of them ideologues, found in the core and extended family, which then proceed to converge like petals around a flower.

In that way, the core story reminded me of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. The plot does a great job of shifting the suitors about and showing their character. One day approaching the auspicious, the other on a downward spiral. Both in terms of Lata’s perception of them and their fortunes in the world. Conversely, we also get more meatier chunks dedicated to Maan, a member of the extended family whose story seems the superfluous component. He doesn’t appear to be suitable at all. Rather the opposite, and a sharp contrast.

It’s very helpful, I think, to think of this as the dramatic plot components of something romantic coupled to a philosophical interrogation of passion itself. Manifesting the very best and worst of people. And the many plot threads also form an encapsulation of “New India”, as it is often referred to in fiction. Out of adolescence, the country itself is struggling as Lata does. Separation from parental figures. Becoming an adult. Educating oneself. Asserting boundaries and cultivating a sense of self. All this comes into the political sections, which are not long, and probably the hardest to get through, if for no other reason than the rest of it I found to be completely enthralling.

I read this like I was raptured. I always seem to read much more slowly when I like it a lot. Soaking in every detail and luxuriating in the actual experience of consuming prose work that is just exactly to my taste. Granted, this was still the case with the political parts, but not as much. My qualms, of course, were tramped down as, again, the innocuous became extremely pertinent to the themes of the novel, and paralleled the plot nicely. It is intricately plotted, exceptionally well written, wildly, too-easily readable, and exactly subjective and prescriptive as a novel ought to be, in my humble opinion.

With a cheeky epigraph showing two signs of the same coin: The superfluous, that very necessary thing…; The secret to being a bore is to say everything, turns out to be a very true thing. Actually, I again and again I wondered why a Gibran quote wasn’t in the epigraph. One—my favourite—is a perfect match to this fiction, and what I’ll leave you with:

“Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.
If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas.
For reason, ruling alone, is a force confining and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.”