Daughters of the House - Softcover

Aikath-Gyaltsen, Indrani

3.14

36 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0345386558 ISBN 13: 9780345386557

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 1994

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“A wondrous accomplishment—a wise story about love, loyalties among women, and the punishments of betrayals.”—Amy Tan

It should have been a day for celebrating: Eighteen-year-old Chchanda, her younger sister Mala, and their old servant Parvati receive news that their beloved aunt is returning from nearby Ranchi with a husband. Their meager ways of eking out a living will come to an end. There will be a man in the house and, as a lawyer, he is rich. But instead of rejoicing, the daughters of the house are threatened.

Rich with nuances and cadences of human emotion, Daughters of the House explores the true meaning of love, betrayal, and compassion. Filled with the sights, sounds, and mores of contemporary rural India, Daughters of the House takes as its characters not only women, but their house, nature, and the society that enmeshes them. Borne along with Indrani Aikath-Gyaltsen’s beguiling language, we come to know and experience their world, one that is strangely familiar, yet unlike any we have ever seen.

Praise for Daughters of the House

“An involving and engaging look at relationships that connect women in families. I found my own sisters, mother, and madrinas in Indrani Aikath-Gyaltsen’s Indian women. A book that quietly, surely won me with its clarity and good writing.”—Julia Alvarez, author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accent

“[A] fine first novel . . . What begins as the narrator’s amusing campaign of passive resistance darkens when sickness and betrayal invade the house and she learns that houses and families can devour as well as sustain.”—The New Yorker

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About the Author:

Until her death in 1993, Indrani Aikath-Gyaltsen was a freelance journalist and hotel owner in Darjeeling. She is the author of Crane's Morning.

From Publishers Weekly:

Set in rural India, this quietly moving tale of doomed passion, scandal and betrayal sensitively probes one family's problems. Chchanda, the sarcastic, precocious teenage narrator, burns with resentment and insecurity when Aunt Madhulika, who raised her, brings home a fiance, selfish lawyer Pretap Singh. The household is a matriarchy: Chchanda's father abandoned them long ago and her mother is dead, leaving the aunt, Chchanda's sister Mala and Parvati, a thorny, vituperative Roman Catholic servant who is nevertheless embraced by the Hindu Brahmin family. Seduced by Singh, Chchanda guiltily carries on a secret affair with him while Madhulika is increasingly crippled by lupus. When her aunt dies, Chchandra, now pregnant, is free to marry her uncle-in-law, but fate and conscience intervene, taking her in a radically different direction. In sharp, shining prose Indian first novelist Aikath-Gyaltsen dissects domestic life with the gimlet precision of Jane Austen.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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