Author: Cauvery Madhavan
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 2003
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN/UPC (if available): 0143029746
Description
A darkly comic account of the disintegration of a marriage.
Balu and Janaki Shankar are a typical, traditional South Indian couple in their late fifties who have been married for thirty-three years. Balu Shankar has dominated the marriage without any serious challenge from his wife and they have lived in reasonable harmony, until they make their first ever trip to Britain, to visit their son. Being too busy to take time off from work and show them around, he books his parents on a 16-day coach tour of Europe. A two-night stop in Amsterdam at the start of the tour leaves Balu struggling with an appetite for newly discovered sexual possibilities and before they know it, the Shankars find their marriage unravelling, one stitch at a time, even as their coach tour hurtles around Europe, exposing them to a new world and new perspectives.