The Literary Mirror

Deshpande's comic novel follows Sudha, a 44-year-old widow, through the family-brokered process of a second marriage — spreadsheets of eligible widowers, a marriage bureau that specialises in 'remarriage cases', and a mother-in-law determined to get the seating chart right this time.

The satire is affectionate rather than cutting, which will read as a strength or a softness depending on appetite. Deshpande clearly likes these characters too much to properly skewer them, and the novel's best jokes come at the expense of the paperwork, never the people filling it out.

It is a slight book, at under two hundred pages, and knows it. As an evening's read about a subject Indian fiction rarely touches — remarriage in middle age, on its own unglamorous terms — it does exactly what it sets out to do.

“Deshpande's satire is gentlest exactly where a sharper writer would have gone for the throat.”