Author: Manorama Mathai
Publisher: Srishti
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 201
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8188575208
Description
Whispering Generations, spanning the lives of four generations, is set in Kerala at a time when the seeds of communism were fast sprouting. The old ancestral house, and the family that lives in it, form the matrix from which the various life stories flow.
The story of Big House is not merely about its aristocratic glory but also about its miseries and mysteries unraveled by Elishuba, the future mistress who, for the moment, has married for love and moved away to live in another culture. It is Elishuba’s mother, young Maria, who brings in the money needed to reverse the decay of the big House and who gradually takes charge. Ironically, perhaps inevitably, she, daughter of an erstwhile servant, develops a close relationship with the outcast within, her mother-in-law and yet, ultimately, she thwarts a plan for terrible revenge and upholds the family’s honour by protecting the secret which drove her father-in-law to suicide.
The wronged daughter-in-law, the resilient grandmother, and the bride, who represents new blood and new ways, all harbour deep within wounds of grief, rancour and humiliation but are forced to tread the course of compromise bound as they are by the burden of the legacy of the Big House.
The winds of change threaten to tear the family apart but after her great grandmother’s death, Elishuba, the offspring of the alliance between the old and the new, is the anchor. She is the voice of the future, and holds the assurance that the painful past is left firmly behind and big House survives.
Contents
In the Future
Looking Back
Young Maria