Secrets and Lies in a Crumbling Kolkata Mansion

Nayantara Roy’s debut novel is a nicely complex addition to the Indo-American fiction genre. 

Her protagonist, Lila De, was born in Kolkata and lived there until she was 16, when she moved to America to join her father and stepmother in a suburban idyll, leaving her bitter mother behind. Lila loves her life and occasional lovers in Brooklyn, but all is upended when her grandfather dies and leaves her the family mansion in Kolkata. She heads off to India for 8 weeks to sort it all out, and perhaps also sort out her difficult relationship with her mother.

Property matters are potential fireballs in many families, and this one is no different. The crumbling five-story house contains (on separate floors) two sons and their wives, one of their daughters and her husband,  Lila’s grandmother, her divorced daughter (Lila’s mother), and a twenty-year old aunt. A grandson lives nearby. All the blood relatives have lived in the house from birth, and it is the only home they’ve known. Of course, there is deep resentment over the grandfather leaving the house to Lila, the American interloper. There are also generations of secrets and inherited behaviours which emerge over the course of the novel.

The  family ties are rather hard to sort out, and despite the family tree at the beginning, for the first half of the book I found myself quite confused about the characters and their relationships. It doesn’t help that there is a huge age gap between Lila’s grandmother and her brothers-in-law, so that they are more like her sons. Still, these messy relationships are realistic enough and quite common, and by the second half of the book I had more or less got the characters straight.

There is a diversity of lived experience among the family. The two brothers do not and have not ever worked. They live off the family money, giving them yet another reason to resent Lila’s inheritance. One grandson Vik is gay, reviled by his uncle. The granddaughter Biddy is a YouTube influencer who makes more money than anyone else in the household, a nicely modern touch. Biddy’s upcoming wedding provides a focal timeline for the story. And of course, there is Lila, the part-American heir.

A love triangle takes up many pages, but Lila is dishonest and unpleasant to both the saintly Jewish-American Seth and her nobly suffering childhood love (now married) Adil. The appearance of Seth allows the author to point out the fascination with white skin in India without defensiveness, but still pointedly.

Seth might have been a movie star, so special was the treatment accorded to him.

Politics appears periodically in the form of the ‘National Popular Front’ (an alias for the BJP of course) and a firebrand Bengali politician called Sreeja Banerjee.

Roy’s writing shines when she is describing family personalities and interactions.

My [half] siblings were regularly hugged by my father, but he and I had the language of nods and unspoken affections that passed between Indian children born in the 80s and their fathers. I dreamed of passing over into the land of effortless holding and kissing that my siblings were citizens of. My father and I smiled at each other instead, and for the moment, it was enough.

The sharpness of Lila’s mother.

”That’s a pretty top. Maybe a little low cut for India.”
“You can’t see cleavage,” I said.
“ That’s because you don’t have any, darling. But see how it shows the top of your tiny breasts?” She said, helpful, as she pointed to my chest.

and life in Kolkata. 

Slowly, my body recalibrated itself to Kolkata. I began to eat dinner later, at nine, even ten. After lunch I felt sleepy, often joining in the citywide siesta. The shopkeepers began to recognize me, the sweet shop owner throwing an extra jilipi into my order and the grocer knowing that I wanted skim milk, the kind in Tetrapaks. I would wake early, before the bell on the newspaperman’s cycle rang below my bedroom window as he threw the rolled up New Statesman onto my balcony, before the school buses rumbled through, before Ram Bhai’s transistor radio began playing Hindu bhajans.

Towards the end, there is a convenient death, after which the p.o.v. shifts to that of a Muslim police detective. This switch to an outsider perspective breaks the reader’s connection to the story.

It was pleasing that the Bengali words were casually included in a natural way, without either italics or explanation, but with the framing of the sentence making it clear that this word refers to food, this other one is a fond nickname, and so forth.

“Stay for dinner. I’ve made begun bhaja and luchi”, she said.

“Listen, Lila Ma, if you want to get some [construction] work done …”

One plot thread did make me chuckle. It beggars belief that a 29 year old fiction editor from New York with no experience in construction or renovation could land in Kolkata, decide to renovate the crumbling  family mansion including electrical upgrades, installation of chandeliers and even installation of an elevator, and have the entire thing completed in 6 weeks  in time for a wedding. She even says

Bengal was not an anxious state — it took its time with words and life, a lazy luxury to all that passed through its sieve. My urgency felt foreign.

No delayed construction permits? No cost overruns? No setbacks waiting for materials or specialized carpenters or masons to arrive? No unexpected pipes or wires found or damaged? No weather problems? We all want this contractor!

There are small problems with continuity in the novel. For example, at one point, Lila is walking

the unfamiliar sari and petticoat rustling between my shins.

On the way she meets Seth, they talk, and then Seth gets into a cab.

Domestic na international? Said the cabbie, staring at my bare legs.

That’s an unusual sari that displays bare legs.

But few authors have a perfect debut novel, and these little problems still leave the book very readable. Roy is a perceptive writer, and this is an immersive view of a complicated Kolkata family.

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