Rich Like Us (New Directions Paperbook, No. 665) - Softcover

Sahgal, Nayantara

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160 ratings by Goodreads

9780811210782: Rich Like Us (New Directions Paperbook, No. 665)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811210782 ISBN 13: 9780811210782

Publisher: New Directions, 1988

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Spanning four generations and chiefly set in the darkening universe of New Delhi during Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's Emergency (1976-77), "Rich Like Us" runs on the oddly parallel life tracks of two very different women. A time promising wealth for the corrupt, but terrifying with sterilization for the poor and jail for the critical, the Emergency changes forever the lives of both women. Sonali and Rose, one Indian, the other cockney English, are deeply devoted friends. Because of her outmoded honesty, Sonali’s successful civil service career is terminated, waking her from her dream of a new India. For Rose, second wife of a Hindu businessman, the corruption of society sets the scene for the last episode of her long adjustment to her adopted home.

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About the Author:

Nayantara Sahgal is a novelist and political commentator who has published eight novels and seven works of non-fiction. She has won the Sinclair Fiction Prize, the Sahitya Akademi Award and the Commonwealth Writers Prize.

From Publishers Weekly:

The focal characters of this novel, set in New Delhi during the turbulences provoked by Indira Gandhi's sterilization campaign and state of emergency, are two womenone Indian, the other Cockney Englishlong-time, deeply devoted friends. Sonali is Oxford-bred, cultured, a scholar and former civil servant infamously betrayed out of a promising career in government; Rose is the second wife of Ram, a Kashmiri businessman laid low by a stroke. Very different in background, they are profoundly related by the fact that they are women in a society that affords little recourse to a native daughter and no legal rights whatever to the second wife in a polygamous household. Rose is in fact murdered because she might constitute a threat to male dominance; but the resourceful Sonali is able to apply her learning to a fresh start. The novel, which teems with the actualities of life in Indiacorruption, injustice, bureaucratic finaglingis wonderfully set apart by a fine, clear, disenchanted eye and an acerbic moral intelligence that is devastating without ever raising its voice.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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