A Woman Madly In Love

Farida Cooper is too shocked by her husband’s treachery even to talk about it but in hiding her shame succeeds only in denying the damage to herself and making casualties of others, among them an infatuated seventeen-year-old boy. Farida is vivacious, voluptuous, intelligent, and rich—not to mention spoiled, selfish and talented (she paints, writes novels, plays the piano)—but her life is hardly as rosy as the appearance suggests. Her father, too wealthy to care what others think, makes a hobby of chasing women. Her mother grows rigid and unloving in consequence. Farida’s saving grace is her Kaki with whom she lives after her sixth birthday, but this also heightens the sense of her parents’ indifference, and she learns to show nothing of her feelings. Instead, her feelings erupt later in a series of disastrous choices. Her story shuttles between Bombay and Chicago, spanning the years from World War II to the Eighties, illuminating along the way themes of love and marriage, feminism and friendship, art and academia.