‘The Ex-Daughters of Tolstoy House’: How much blood must be spilled before the cycle is broken?

At the Tolstoy House, tucked within stately bungalows and manicured boulevards of Lutyens’ Delhi, Naina is cleaning up her mother’s blood. She knows what to do, what she has to do – what her Ma taught her to do. But her mind is still fractured, the blood is seeping onto her skin and somewhere deeper, where fear and complicity reside. After the last rites, when Naina returns to the house where the walls seem to absorb more than childhood memories, she thinks about her mother, sisters – but they linger in silence, aching, as if suspended in waiting. Naina’s accounts are interwoven with her mother Meera’s recollections. Meera Sehgal’s life has all the makings of perfect domesticity. A respectable husband, three daughters, a sprawling home – but under this facade of order lies dread, weighed down by generational trauma, expectation and silence.

Meera’s accounts ripple through marital bliss and the constant anxiety of not being enough – of being watched, conditioned to be perfect, to serve, to obey – as she is remade through an experiment, layer by layer, event by event. Rini, who seemingly is her best friend, is complicit in this. In Meera’s world, submission is a survival tactic, silence...

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