Home

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 shortlived,  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.