Her second novel tells the story of a newly-wed writer experiencing rapid social isolation and extreme violence at her husband’s hands...The journey towards that assertion is a tough one. It begins with a stripping of the narrator’s autonomy after her marriage to a university lecturer, Marxist and one-time revolutionary in south India who uses communist ideas “as a cover for his own sadism”. When she moves with him to an unfamiliar city, an assault on her tongue, mind and body begins....Shame, pride and a society in which everyone from parents to police expects a woman to put up and shut up force the realisation that only she can save herself... Open it, however, and a voice emerges that expresses desire, feels pain and has steely courage. It screams from its demure outerwear, refusing to be silenced in its search for love. The reader is left with the impact and implications of that, and the ideal of servile Indian femininity is in tatters at last.