Description

Behind the carved sandstone facade of Rathore Haveli in old Jodhpur, three generations of women share one address and a thousand unspoken griefs. There is Dadi Saheb Indira Kanwar, eighty-six, who arrived as a fourteen-year-old bride in 1952 and has not crossed the haveli’s threshold in forty years. Her daughter-in-law Sumitra, who married into this family for love and stayed for duty. And her granddaughter Tanvi, twenty-six, who has flown home from Bombay for a cousin’s wedding and has begun to ask the question no one in this family asks: yeh bais kamra band kyun hai?

What lies behind that locked door — a brass-bound room at the far end of the zenana, garlanded with marigolds every Tuesday by a maid who has done so for thirty years without explanation is the secret on which the entire Rathore family has been built. A love affair in 1962. A child no one will name. A bride sent away in disgrace. A brother who came back from Bangladesh in 1971 and was never the same.

As the wedding sangeet swells in the courtyard and the women of the family gather in heavy ghagras and heavier silences, Tanvi begins to pry open the door her grandmother has kept shut for half a century and discovers that every woman in this haveli has been quietly carrying a piece of the same broken story.

Rich, atmospheric and emotionally devastating, Haveli ke Andar is a Rajasthani family saga unlike any other — a novel about the rooms women are locked into, and the daughters brave enough, finally, to open them.