Fiction: In the 1920s, young people in Delhi, Bombay, Calcutta, Banaras are finding new ways to live

For how many years have I seemed to myself to be both inside and outside the family?

As a young girl, I once had a nightmare in which several of our relatives were playing a version of the game Four Corners that we frequently played as children. They were, however, standing not in a lane, a garden or a park as we did, but one in each corner of every room in our small house, and they were tigers with human faces, standing upright, brightly striped, smiling red-mouthed at me and lunging as I dodged from room to room. My mother, usually a sympathetic listener, was displeased when I recounted the dream, and said, “Don’t talk like that.” I was silenced but the dream remained with me.

My mercurial mother, singing as she went about her chores, unfurled stories about her childhood and youth, scene after brightly painted scene that shone in contrast to the small, dark rooms in which she was now confined. Our vacations were spent in her father’s bungalow in Allahabad with my grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins. But our flat in Delhi was a complete world too, a snug if small ship, where I sat curled up on a...

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