Portrait of a Woman Madly in Love

Farida Cooper is too shocked by her husband’s treachery to talk about it but by hiding her shame denies the damage to herself and makes casualties of others among them an infatuated 17-year-old boy. Farida is vivacious intelligent beautiful talented rich spoiled and selfish but her life is hardly as rosy as the appearance suggests. Her father’s affairs render her mother frigid. Her saving grace is her Kaki with whom she lives after her sixth birthday but this also heightens the sense of her parents’ indifference and she learns to show nothing of her feelings allowing them instead to erupt years later in a series of disastrous choices. Her story shuttles between Bombay and Chicago spanning the years from WWII to the 1980s illuminating themes of love and marriage feminism and friendship art and academia. A splendid foray into the initiation rites of the modern fearless woman … brimful of erudition some age-old wisdoms and a more recent one that everyone seems to have forgotten: the meaning of gender equality.—Tara Sahgal India Today An unhurried but immersive tale of ambition and love.—Kirkus Reviews A remarkable feat … an erudite and literary novel which is also a potboiler.—Bapsi Sidhwa Fezana Journal A complex tapestry of marriage love and betrayal.—Prasenjit Choudhury Deccan Herald A deliberate and skilful construction of a well-paced and cadenced narrative.—Sundeep Sen The Hindu Delightful and entertaining.—Gopali Bandyopadhyay 8th Day