Pilgrimage

Ira Singh

ISBN 10: 9386702037 / ISBN 13: 9789386702036

Published by Speaking Tiger, 2018

About this Item

From early to middle age, Pilgrimage tells the story of Monica Mona at home over three defining, pivotal events in her life. In the opening section, set in contemporary times, Monica, now a woman with a penchant for causes and sympathy for the dispossessed and the underdog, is stranded on a highway, surrounded and stalled by aggressive kanwariyas marching to the Ganga, even as her father struggles for life in the ambulance they are travelling on. Then, going back in time, the novel unearths two incidents which made the girl the woman she has become. Punishment finds Mona stepping into adolescence in a small town in north India in the 1980s, becoming aware of her body and its possibilities for the first time, the norms and attitudes which seek to control it, and the ways in which she can subvert them. But when her mother catches Mona spying on a rooftop homosexual encounter, everything changes. And the in-between story, Transgressions , follows Monica as a young scholar of Delhi University in the 1990s having rejected the demands of home and parents conducting research on the psychology of drug-addicts, and a doomed, intense love affair with Ajay, a heroin junkie. Evocative, precise and spare, Pilgrimage is an extraordinary exploration of one life negotiating family, sex, love and the illusion of home. It is also the story of middle-class India and its dysfunctions, its casual bigotry and paralyzing insecurities. (jacket).

Seller Inventory # 126511

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Pilgrimage
• Publisher: Speaking Tiger
• Publication Date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 9386702037
• ISBN 13: 9789386702036
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

In the aftermath of a bizarre confrontation with Kalol Mondal—a small-time hustler and Party goon—Pinaki Bose, a timid Bengali babu, bumbles into the ambit of the savagely brilliant architect, Biren Roy. Dazzled by Biren’s breadth of vision and utter contempt for the conventional, he commissions him to design a country house—committing the whole family’s savings to it. But Biren, paralyzed by his grand ideals and his passion for perfection, is slowly sinking into a drunken torpor. And Pinaki, ignorant of the Party’s involvement in all land deals, must endure not just Kalol Mondal’s ominous presence while buying his plot, but more worryingly, his infatuation with Pinaki’s young daughter.


Set in the bleak Communist Calcutta of the 1980s,The Escapists of J. Mullick Road is a wry meditation on a fabled city in physical and moral decline. Usha Ananda Krishna’s subtly witty but compassionate take on the disparate lives that entwine over the building of a house is a tour de force of modern literary writing