Book review: The Tiger`s Share by Keshava Guha

THE TIGER`S SHARE by Keshava Guha, India publishers Hachette.

Sons and daughters, heirs and non-heirs, the seriously wealthy and the merely rich, the collecting of property in and around the capital city, class barriers, a glimpse into the lives of the now shrinking Anglophone liberal elite, societal snobbery, the overweening sense of entitlement,  suffocating patriarchy, the dismal- as- hell air quality in the colder months (`the smoke was appalling but it grew familiarly appalling, appallingly familiar`),  the family cess the younger generation sometimes needs to pay towards a sister`s wedding or a grandparent`s medical bills, and at the very core inheritance/inheritance/inheritance …the author takes all these non-disparate strands and puts them together for his scathing indictment of New Delhi in the New Bharat.

The protagonist/narrator of the story, Tara Saxena,  is one of the city`s OWLs (acronym,  mine)  Old Wealthy Lady, (the `old` not an indicator of her age but her lineage) who comes off as curiously androgynous in tone/voice/manner. Taras father seems to be standing on the cusp of a strange post-retirement disequilibrium (the word seeming to be the authors favourite, appearing many times) , with Tara a sympathetic onlooker to his cause. Tara`s brother Rohit is busy sealing his position as heir apparent but is not half as busy as his friend and boss Kunal Chawla, who is locking in his own position as Head of the family after his father`s demise.

Kunal Chawla`s trajectory is clear, Rohit Saxena`s less so, and the shadowy  Brahm Saxena`s even less so.

Everything heads, as everything must, to a cataclysmic conclusion, then smooths out into an `as before` pattern. Because that is how life generally plays out.