Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Synopsis
In 1980s Bombay, a highly regarded voice teacher and his affluent sixteen-year-old student enter into a relationship that will have unexpected and lasting consequences in their lives, and the lives of their families. With exquisitely sensuous detail, quiet humor, and unsentimental poignancy, Amit Chaudhuri paints a luminous portrait of the spiritual and emotional force behind a revered Indian tradition; of two fundamentally different but intricately intertwined families; and of a society choosing between the old and the new.
The Barnes & Noble Review
Toward the beginning of Amit Chaudhuri's delicate yet expansive novel, 16-year-old Nirmalaya Sengupta stands on the beach near the high-rise towers going up on Bombay's Marine Drive. His father's recent promotions in a British company are moving his family up in the world, and their new flat in Thacker Towers, where his mother takes lessons in Indian classical singing, is supposedly more prepossessing than their former home on historically stately Malabar Hill. It is by now the mid-1970s -- marking the first full generation after Independence. The towers, dotted with tiny men on rickety bamboo scaffoldings, also mark vast change in urban landscape of Bombay, tottering expansion fueled by population growth and poverty and ambition and also by corruption, a chaotic urbanization that is sending the city sprawling outwards into tangled slums.