The Laws of Inheritance

The suffocating air pollution in Delhi has found its way into literature and popular culture in more ways than one.

- Faizal Khan

In her 2017 book, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati Roy, a Delhi resident and Booker Prize-winning author, chastised her fellow-residents for romanticizing about the pollution while social, moral and political decay abounds around them. In his second novel, Keshava Guha goes further. In The Tiger's Share, which follows his debut novel, Accidental Magic, six years ago, Guha wraps a wreath of melancholy around the pervasiveness of pollution in the national capital.

The befouling air of the capital runs across The Tiger's Share as a metaphor for the ills of its all-encompassing wealth. Set in Delhi, the novel tells the story of the rich and the powerful, whose every breath is a push for more money and power. Narrated by a lawyer who is worried about the growing morass around her, it offers a rare view from the inside; a tale of two families facing internal feuds in south Delhi, the stark symbol of the gaping divide between the rich and the poor in the country. The Tiger's Share runs a scalpel through the guts of a decaying city.

Guha's canvas is short and narrow in