Playwright and television executive Nayantara Roy’s debut novel The Magnificent Ruins draws the reader into the familial relationships, love life, and professional challenges of Lila De.
Lila is 29 years old and is a successful editor at a boutique publishing company in New York. Her company gets acquired by a corporate publishing house, giving her an unexpected promotion. At the same time, she learns that her beloved grandfather in Kolkata, India, has died, and she is the heir to his crumbling mansion in Ballygunge, the place where her maternal extended family, the Lahiris, live, chasing dreams of their past glory. This ancestral home, built by Lila’s great-grandfather, has a special place in Lila’s heart. It is her history and her ties to her mother’s family. It is also a place that harbors volatile people, complicated relationships, and dark family secrets.
Lila’s mother, a university professor, lives in a studio apartment on the top floor and is prone to fits of rage and has a difficult relationship with both Lila, her daughter, and Geeta, her mother. Along with the house, Lila has inherited a trust fund to help with the maintenance of the property and to also provide annual stipends to the different family members — her grandmother, her mother, two uncles, and some cousins. The uncles, Hari and Rana, are unemployed, and it is the women of the house who are gainfully employed. Geeta, the matriarch, rules over this household through a complicated mix of love and manipulation.
Lila — who left home at 16 and moved to New York to live with her father, his second wife, a white woman, and her half-siblings — has great trepidation about what awaits her in Kolkata. To further complicate her life, she is in a no-strings-attached relationship with Seth, an author who she discovered and whose messy second novel she is in the process of editing. With the support of her father — he offers her his flat in Kolkata to stay and connects her to his lawyer friend Palekar for legal help — Lila travels back to Kolkata for eight weeks, much to the chagrin of her new boss, who wants her to grow the publishing company. As if there are not enough complications in Lila’s life, her return also brings her into contact with Adil, her first love; a family wedding of a cousin who is a YouTube celebrity influencer; and a national election campaign that has a right-wing party trying to take over the state.
The reader is quickly drawn into Lila’s story and the many challenges she faces. Her family is angry that her grandfather left her the house and the trust and is involved in challenging the will legally while also embracing her lovingly. The tensions between her mother and her grandmother; the volatility of her uncles; her relationship with her cousins; the sudden arrival of Seth, who wants an exclusive relationship with her; and her rekindled romance with Adil offer the reader a juicy plot with engaging characters. Through all this, we follow relationships that get recalibrated and those that crumble, even as Lila deftly remodels the mansion, manages the family finances, and supports the expenses for her cousin’s lavish wedding. Most importantly, we watch Lila grow and evolve as a person who is trying to figure out what she really wants in terms of family, romance, and career. This is an engaging novel that is well worth a read.
Nalini Iyer is a Professor of English at Seattle University where she teaches courses in Asian American, Postcolonial, and South Asian Studies. She is the author/editor of several books in literary criticism. She lives in Kirkland. WA.
