"The Illuminated" by Anindita Ghose

An audio book.

While Shashi and Robbi are in the States visiting their investment banker son, Surju, Robbi dies. She has a philosopy degree (Hegel etc), he's a prize-winning architect. We learn about their arranged marriage (she 22, he 30). Their daughter couldn't get to the funeral. Shashi returns to Delhi.

Tara is a 1st year PhD student (Sanskrit). Her father (Robbi) designed the university she goes to. The dean is proud of the support for the disabled, etc. The Neuroliguistic Lab is run by a woman, Thulasi. But there are many restrictive rules for females. A world famous prof, Indian, 52, visits from the States, planning to fund a computational linguistics there, looking for 2 people to work on it. We dip into his PoV to learn of his past. She pesters him with academic questions, then suddenly decides to visit him at his hotel.

Shashi teaches at a juvenile reform school. She's visited by a delegation from the MSS, who offer consolation and also advice about how she should behave.

Bibbet, Robbie's friend from student days, came to stay. He was living on a commune, had been for years. She and Robbie had visited him there, even wondered about staying.

We go back to Tara's time in Tibet before her father's death. She's invited to the house of a separated father of 2 young kids. When the kids are in bed she offers sex and is turned down. When she hears the news of her father's death she doesn't over react. She returns to Delhi once her mother had returned and "the tourists of despair had gone."

The visiting prof A.D. had been married twice and had a son. Tara wasn't chosen to go to Chicago. A.D. said she'd spent too much time with him and too little on the project. Also it would have looked like favourtism. But he tells her that others had voted for her. She thinks about female characters in the old Sanskrit texts, and Tagore's work.

There's a chapter about Dolly that could be removed.

Wife and daughter resolve differences, realise they're not so different after all. They decide to sell the house, Tara decides to formally complain about the job decision, and maybe Shushi would try the commune.

"she thought to herself" appears.

Other reviews

• goodreads
• Soni Wadhwa
• Saloni Sharma (Tara, keen to avoid turning into her mother, shares, unwittingly, Shashi’s mistrust of the backhanded compliment of being “not like other girls”. ... That women’s agency is under threat in present day India is brought home to the reader in the space the book gives to the MSS – the Mahalaxmi Seva Sangh, an organisation of volunteers / sevaks, styling themselves as the custodians of Indian culture and dedicating their energies to preventing the corruption of Indian women by westerns influences. The similarities with a real-life organisation with similar concerns and political goals are thinly, if at all, veiled. )
• Simar Bhasin