Keshava Guha’s new novel: Tara and Lila challenge patriarchal Delhi with their ambitions

This time was different. Lila had brought Raj. I tried to think if I had ever had an actual conversation with him. Raj’s family was from Delhi, but he had grown up in Dubai and studied in the US. He and Lila had met in business school. It was a measure of where I’d stood with Lila that when they married I was only invited to the reception, not the wedding or the mehendi or the sangeet.

I remember going for fifteen minutes tops, partly out of politeness – not that my absence would have been noted – but mostly out of curiosity as to the chap who Lila had chosen, of all chaps, to hitch to herself for life. Lila would not divorce. There was no divorce that could escape a self-indicted charge of failure. If the husband were cruel, or drunk, or professionally feckless, it would connote a failure of original judgment; if he were unhappy, or unfaithful, or simply bored, her failure would be of effort or competence. She would not fail at such a thing, or anything.

At the reception Raj had looked more suited to throwing an American football around than to any Indian idea of marriage. He had...

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