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skeletons come tumbling out of the family closet in the wake of Zephyr’s father’s death. As if the debilitating blow of losing her beloved Gravy was not enough, shocking revelations threaten to destroy all that Zephyr holds dear and precious. They tarnish her memories and forever shatter her illusion of a regular loving family. Her father had already withdrawn from life long before that successful attempt at suicide ended it all for him. And now her mother having lost the love of her life is losing her equilibrium too. Between talking to a ghost, reliving good bad and downright ugly memories of her many heartbreaks her mother blurts out that Gravy had never even been Zephyr’s father. Unable to bear this betrayal Zephyr flees from Delhi to a university in New Zealand trying to run and hide.
The book has a diary-like quality due to its raw and painful candour as no holds are barred and tumultuous inner strife is laid bare with jarring honesty. The extraordinary detail in which the characters are etched renders them lovable, relatable, hateable or pitiable from page to page. The parables, elaborations and recollections convincingly depict the devastating reality of overwhelming grief, acute loneliness and excruciating dilemmas. In her debut novel, Supriya Dravid skilfully tackles the sensitive subject of fraught parent-child relationships that have the power to make or break individuals. And the utterly sobering reality that parents are ultimately human; frail and flawed.
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A year later, Zephyr
returns to the broken mother she left behind who has since returned to
her childhood home in Madras; one which she fled in her youth. She is
there to care for her dying father Don, the one person she hates and
never wanted to see again. In the vain hope of exorcising the ghosts
of her past which still haunt her. But all too soon after reaching
Madras Zephyr regrets she ever came back. She should never have come
back; she should never have opened that drawer and never untied that
muslin cloth bundle because some secrets are best left untold. Now she
knows too much and doesn’t know what to do with the horrific truth
she has discovered. This dark secret is now her cross to bear.
Unwillingly she is now part of the family tradition of keeping deep
dark secrets. She dare not tell her mother or it’ll destroy her as
it is destroying Zephyr and destroyed Zephyr’s faith in another man
she loved: her grandfather. In one fell swoop her fondness for the
flamboyant, idiosyncratic and overbearing Don is history like her
happy childhood.