Description

Aishwarya Bhatt is thirty-nine, married fifteen years to a perfectly decent Bombay corporate lawyer, mother of one quietly distant teenage daughter, and — although nobody around her has noticed — has not, for the better part of seven years, recognised the woman in her own bathroom mirror.

When her mother-in-law moves out of the family flat in Pali Hill into an assisted-living facility in Powai, a corner room on the second floor becomes — for the first time in Aishwarya’s married life — entirely, unambiguously, hers. Her husband, generously, suggests she might use it as a yoga room. Her daughter suggests an additional study. Aishwarya, almost in spite of herself, locks the door from the inside one Tuesday afternoon and discovers, in the long warm silence that follows, something she has not felt since she was twenty-three: privacy.

Over the next year, as Aishwarya begins to inhabit *the room* — first cautiously, then more honestly, then with a slow sensual fearlessness she had not known she still possessed — *Khwabon ka Kamra* tells the story of a marriage that does not end, exactly, but is gently, completely, rewritten from the inside.

There is a return to a long-buried art practice. There is an unexpected friendship with a younger neighbour. There is a single, candid conversation with her husband that takes nine months to lead up to. And there is, finally, a woman learning — without apology, in a country that has rarely taught its married women this — that pleasure is not something that has to be earned by being good.

Lush, deeply sensual, and emotionally fearless, *Khwabon ka Kamra* is a novel for grown Indian women who have begun, quietly, to wonder what their own room would look like.