Description

*A novel for adult readers.*

Megha Saxena is thirty-four, divorced two years, and quietly furious at how little she still knows about her own body. She has a successful career as a Delhi art curator, a tasteful Hauz Khas flat, and a list of perfectly reasonable men she has politely refused. What she does not have, has never quite had, is the kind of life she sometimes glimpses in the paintings she sells — the kind in which a woman is permitted to want, openly, recklessly, and on her own terms.

Then she takes a six-week residency at a private artist’s retreat in the Kumaon hills, and meets Aman Roy — a forty-year-old sculptor who lives alone on the property, who speaks rarely, who watches her the way a serious reader watches a difficult sentence.

What unfolds between them, over a long Himalayan autumn, is not a love story in any familiar shape. It is a slow, careful, devastatingly honest negotiation between two adults who have decided to stop lying — to each other, and more dangerously, to themselves. About what they want. About what they have been taught to be ashamed of. About the women Megha was told to become, and the woman she has been waiting, all this time, to be.

Lush, deeply sensual, and emotionally fearless, *Reshmi Raatein* is a novel for grown women — about pleasure as a form of self-knowledge, and desire as a kind of homecoming.