Four families & a funeral

Ritual and retinue mystify immigrant lives far from home

- 

in Gupta’s home overlooking the breathtaking San Francisco bay. The American lawyer is at a loss how to secure permits for a cremation in California.

The family and friends wonder what Gupta had meant by his will after all. What begins as a set of strange legally-binding instructions soon lapses into a litany of doubt and disbelief. Those who gather around the grieving family, which includes his wife Usha, their teenage son and Gupta’s widowed mother, find his instructions too troubling to comprehend as well as carry out on a land foreign to the rituals.

Published seven years after his previous novel, Harilal & Sons, which was nominated for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature, Every Room Has a View negotiates the treacherous terrain of roots and identity that make immigrant life vulnerable. From the early 20th century setting of