Second Thoughts

The new bestseller from India's biggest selling novelist

A bittersweet love story for the Nineties

It seems like the perfect match. Maya is pretty, young, eager to escape her dull, middle-class home in Calcutta and plunge into the whirl of Bombay, where she moves after her marriage. Ranjan, handsome, hard-driving and ambitious, has all the glamour of an American university degree and a wealthy family background. Maya is determined to be the ideal wife. Instead, she finds herself trapped and stifled by the confines of an arranged marriage to a man who, she discovers, is rigidly conservative and completely indifferent to her desires. She begins to experience, too, the utter loneliness of a stranger in suburban Bombay.

And then she strikes up a friendship with Nikhil, her charming, college-going neighbour, and the stage is set for an explosive tale of love, betrayal and paths not taken.