Author: Anita Nair
: Suchita Mittal
Publisher: Penguin/Yatra
Year: 2005
Language: Hindi
Pages: 283
ISBN/UPC (if available): 9780144000425
Description
A Hindi translation of English novel Ladies Coupe seeks to ask can a woman stay single and be happy, or does a woman need a man to feel complete? The story of a woman's search for strength and independence.
Meet Akhilandeswari, Akhila for short: forty-five and single, an income-tax clerk, and a woman who has never been allowed to live her own life. Until the day she gets herself a one-way ticket to the seaside town of Kanyakumari, gloriously alone for the fist time in her life and determined to break free of all that her conservative Tamil Brahmin life has bound her to.
In the intimate atmosphere of the ladies coupe which she shares with five other women, Akhila gets to know her follow travelers: Janki, pampered wife and confused mother; Margret Shanti, a chemistry teacher married to the poetry of elements and an insensitive tyrant too self-absorbed to recognize her needs; Prabha Devi, the perfect daughter and wife, transformed for life by a glimpse of a swimming pool; fourteen-year-old Sheila, with her ability to perceive what others cannot and Marikolanthu, whose innocence was destroyed by one night of lust.
As she listens to the women's stories, Akhila is drawn into the most private moments of their lives, seeking in them a solution to the question that has been with her all her life: Can a woman stay single and be happy, or does a woman need a man to feel complete?