The Sanjans had planned to enjoy the tiger cub and surrender the adult to the zoo, but no plan had been made for the adolescent. The family is breakfasting in the compound of their bungalow when the cub gets its first taste of blood from a cut on Sohrab Sanjana’s hand. Also in attendance are Daisy (Sohrab’s English wife, married when she was stranded by World War II in India); Rustom (Sohrab’s brother, infatuated by Daisy, challenging his brother for her affection); Dolly (their mother, afraid the rivalry between her sons may erupt into violence echoing the rivalry between two brothers whom she had married in succession); and Savak (Dolly’s husband, still paying the price for his own infatuation thirty years earlier). Their story spans the years from 1910 to 1945, encompassing scenes in which a yogi’s ‘spirituality’s is exposed by a monkey, a ten-year-old English girl seduces an eight-year-old Indian boy, and a young Englishwoman meets her first lover at the silver Jubilee of George V. A family secret lies at the heart of the story, but the periphery is no less thrilling: two lovers escape from Stalin’s Soviet Union to India and a solider meets with tragedy during the Kut-al-amara campaign of the Great War in Mesopotamia.
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