Family matters

Description:

"The setting is Bombay, mid-1990s. Nariman Vakeel, suffering from Parkinson's disease, is the elderly patriarch of a small, discordant family. In a building called Chateau Felicity, he and his two middle-aged stepchildren - Coomy, bitter and domineering, and her just-younger brother, Jal, mild mannered and acquiescent - occupy a once-elegant apartment whose ruin is progressing as rapidly as Nariman's disease. Coomy has "rules to govern every aspect of [Nariman's] shrunken life," but even she cannot keep him from his evening walks. When he stumbles and breaks an ankle (fulfilling one of Coomy's nagging prophecies), she has hardly said "I told you so" before she is plotting to turn his round-the-clock care over to her younger, sweet-tempered half sister. Roxana, her husband, and their two sons live in an already overcrowded apartment, but Coomy knows that Roxana will not refuse her. What Coomy cannot know is that she has set in motion a great unraveling (and an unexpected repair) of the family - and a revelation of its deeply love-torn past."--BOOK JACKET.

subjects: Literature,  Reminiscing in old age,  Stepfamilies,  Parent and adult child,  Domestic fiction,  Older men,  Patients,  Apartment houses,  Fiction,  Parkinson's disease,  Pflegebedürftigkeit,  Tochter,  Mishnah,  New York Times reviewed,  Fiction, general,  India, fiction,  Family, religious life

Places: Bombay (India)