While Sivakami remains confined within the house, her children and grandchildren go out into a rapidly changing world. The first journey that the characters take is by bullock cart, in 1896; by the middle of the novel, the next generation will be sitting in the train, and the old rules of caste and touchability soon collapse.

At 600-plus pages, The Toss of a Lemon, the debut novel by Canada-based Indian Padma Viswanathan, is a sweeping multi-generational epic. It begins in a Tamil village at the end of the 19th century, when the world still seems stable and secure, with everything and everyone in their proper place, and moves slowly through the decades to close in the 1960s, by which time the family is caught in the midst of social and political upheaval. The Brahmins have lost the dominance that was theirs for centuries; old certainties have begun to crumble; and the shards of this collapse are quickly being rearranged in new alignments.

This transformation is not easy: it often involves pain, even violence. At one point, two enactments of the Ramayana are staged in the village: one is the traditional version, with Rama as the heroic king; the other, a revisionist production, has Ravana as the hero. On the final day of the week-long performances, both versions come up against each other, resulting in mayhem.

Characters, too, contain contradictions within themselves: such as Muchami, the gay man trapped in a sexless marriage to comply with his mother’s wishes; Mari, his wife, who rejects the ways of her own caste to adopt some of the strict abstinences of the Brahmin lifestyle; orthodox Sivakami, given strength by her faith to take on every new challenge; and lovely, life-affirming Thangam, whose gold dust heals everyone around her but depletes her own body of sustenance.

... contd.