Description

At No. 47 Pedder Road, four generations of the Shah family have been sitting down to Sunday lunch every week for sixty-one years. The dining table seats fourteen. The matriarch, Bhanumati Shah — ninety-one years old, sharp-eyed, terrifyingly polite — has not missed a single Sunday since her wedding in 1963.

Over the course of one calendar year, in twelve Sundays, *Sunday at Number 47* tells the story of a great Gujarati joint family at the precise moment it begins to come apart.

There is the eldest son who has been quietly diverting company funds. The American granddaughter who has come home to announce she is converting. The widowed daughter-in-law who has, after thirty years of dutiful silence, decided to remarry — and not to a Gujarati. The seventeen-year-old great-grandson with a YouTube channel he has not told the family about. And, threading through it all, a brewing legal battle over the family flat that will, by December, separate three branches of the Shahs forever.

Warm, witty, and deeply observed, *Sunday at Number 47* is a love letter to the disappearing institution of the Indian joint family — its theatre, its tyranny, its peculiar, frustrating, lifelong tenderness.

For everyone who has ever sat at a long Indian dining table and wondered who, exactly, was holding the family together.