![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Mistry’sbook focuses on four characters hailing from across a spectrum of backgrounds – Dina Dalal, Ishvar Darji, his nephew Omprakash Darji, and Maneck Kohlah.Ĭollege student Kohlah rents a room in the house of Dina Dalal, a 40-ish widowed seamstress. To make matters worse, she and her son, the now notorious Sanjay Gandhi, launched a forced sterilization campaign that preyed upon the poorer sections of Indian society, causing irretrievable damage to tens of thousands of Indian citizens and serving up a harsh political lesson that has reverberated down the ages, hampering subsequent attempts at checking India’s population growth. The book is set in “an unidentified city” in India – one that bears a remarkable resemblance to Bombay – opening in the 1970s during the turmoil of the Indira Gandhi-imposed Emergency – a suspension of the Indian Constitution after the then Indian Prime Minister was accused of political chicanery. Defying a court order calling for her resignation, Gandhi instead used the Emergency to throw her opponents in jail, as well as a slew of others who didn’t quite see the world in the same way as she did – activists, intellectuals, journalists, even students. ![]()
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