Escaping her failing marriage in the United States, Grace Marisola has
returned to Pondicherry to cremate her mother. Once there, she receives
an unexpected inheritance--a property on the isolated beaches south of
Madras--and discovers a sister she never knew she had: Lucia, four years
older, who has spent her life in a residential facility.
Settling into the pink house on its spit of wild beach, Grace builds a
new and precarious life with Lucia, the village housekeeper Mallika, the
drily witty Auntie Kavitha, and an ever-multiplying band of dogs, led by
the golden Raja. In the lush wilderness of Paramankeni, with its vacant
bus stops colonized by flying foxes, its temples shielded by canopies of
teak and tamarind, where every dusk the fishermen line the beach smoking
and mending their nets, Grace feels that she has come to the very end of
the world. But her attempts to leave her old self behind prove first a
struggle, then a strain, as she discovers the chaos, tenderness, fury,
and bewilderment of life with Lucia.
In fierce, lyrical prose, Doshi presents an unflinching portrait of
contemporary India, exploring the tensions between urban and rural life,
modernity and tradition, duty and freedom. Luminous, funny, surprising,
and heartbreaking, Small Days and Nights is a story of the ties that
bind, the secrets we bury, and the sacrifices we make to forge lives
that have meaning.
