pp 208 Paperback; excellent condition; uncreased spine; clean pages // It should have been a day for celebrating: Eighteen-year-old Chchanda, her younger sister Mala, and their old servant Parvati receive news that their beloved aunt is returning from nearby Ranchi with a husband. Their meager ways of eking out a living will come to an end. There will be a man in the house and, as a lawyer, he is rich. But instead of rejoicing, the daughters of the house are threatened. Set in rural India, this quietly moving tale of doomed passion, scandal and betrayal sensitively probes one family's problems. Chchanda, the sarcastic, precocious teenage narrator, burns with resentment and insecurity when Aunt Madhulika, who raised her, brings home a fiance, selfish lawyer Pretap Singh. The household is a matriarchy: Chchanda's father abandoned them long ago and her mother is dead, leaving the aunt, Chchanda's sister Mala and Parvati, a thorny, vituperative Roman Catholic servant who is nevertheless embraced by the Hindu Brahmin family. Seduced by Singh, Chchanda guiltily carries on a secret affair with him while Madhulika is increasingly crippled by lupus. When her aunt dies, Chchandra, now pregnant, is free to marry her uncle-in-law, but fate and conscience intervene, taking her in a radically different direction.