The Literary Mirror

Reema Vohra's third novel returns to the house on Birhana Road, where three generations share one kitchen and disagree about almost everything served from it. The tin almirah of the title holds the mortgage papers, a dead uncle's watch, and — this is the novel's one contrivance, and it earns it — a stack of unsent letters nobody has admitted to writing.

Vohra is better with rooms than with plot. Chapters move by season rather than event, and a reader looking for a turn will wait a long time for one that never quite arrives as drama, more as erosion — a business sold, a son who stops visiting, a matriarch who starts calling the youngest by her sister's name.

The prose is plain to a fault in the first hundred pages and then, without announcing it, starts doing more. By the time the almirah is finally opened, in the last chapter, the book has already told you everything inside it. That is either the point or the problem, and The Literary Mirror leans toward the former.

“The almirah never opens for the reader — only ever for the family, and only ever off the page.”