Skeletons tumble out of homes in Manju Kapur’s fiction, shaking their very foundations. If it is Virmati’s affair with a married professor in her debut novel Difficult Daughters, it is Astha’s lesbian tangle in A Married Woman. Both are also deeply po-litical, one steeped in the Partition, the other in the unrest surrounding the Babri Masjid demolition. In Home, which took her a decade to write, Kapur chronicles family his-tory, going all the way—we follow the rebel-lious Nisha as she is torn between a love affair and an arranged marriage—and back to keep the home together. No worldly politics in this, only the more difficult politics of home.

Kapur explores the not-so-subtle rela-tionship between domestic trauma (the Ban-wari Lals, cloth merchants and residents of Delhi’s Karol Bagh, are desperate that noth-ing breaks down the joint family) and wo-rldly events (a wave of modernity is on them, not least expressed by Nisha’s courageous haircut and desire to design readymades and the reconstruction sought in the family home so that every family has an attached bath). But then Nisha’s rebellion remains just that—a desperate cry against the unfairness of it all. In the end, many karva chauth kathas and vat Savitri kathas later, she is forced to settle for domesticity. “Ten months after Nisha’s marriage, twins were born. One girl, one boy. Her duty was over—God had been kind, however hard it was to believe.”

Kapur sets up the story nicely, telling us how the Banwari Lal family “belonged to a class whose skills had been honed over gen-erations to ensure prosperity in the market-place.

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