In Nayantara Roy’s “The Magnificent Ruins,” the ill-kept and crumbling family home inherited by its protagonist, Lila De, feels like a stand-in for many things. For the decay and growing marginality of the Bengali bhadralok, the one-time gentlefolk whose comeuppance was girded by their cultural proximity to the British. For the banishing of old hierarchies, with the Lahiri family’s brittle and brutal women serving as pillars, withering on the outside but resolutely propping up their household. For the inevitable and relieving whiffs of change, as Lila ushers in modern amenities: geysers and fans, laundry machines, a sturdy lift. For a Kolkata that is both vanishing and alive, some parts a cobwebby stasis, others conserved as throwbacks amidst the rise of glossy towers.

Confronting Unreliable Kin

Inheritances, however, are not just material. When Lila, who is currently a rising publishing professional in New York, becomes the surprise beneficiary of her grandfather’s will, she’s torn. The mansion, after all, still houses her complicated relatives, her mother, grandmother, uncles, aunts, and cousins. There are none that she can rely on for unconditional support, or even for a knotty, contingent trust. Least of all her mother, Maya Lahiri, who has not been on speaking terms with her for the last fourteen months. Such on-off withdrawals are not new or even warranted by anything that Lila might have said or done. Rather than heading to Kolkata with the mounting elation of going home, she dreads her approaching nearness to her volatile mother.

A Plot Twist at Work

Besides, this is not an ideal time to leave her workplace. Wyndham, the publishing house she works for, has been acquired by a platform run by a Silicon Valley billionaire. It’s no longer driven by an ardor for literature, or by an editor’s pride in a curated list of world-changing reads. New, amped-up ambitions are accompanied by new, amped-up problems. On the surface, Lila adapts to the changed outlook. She suggests social media outreach and building online reader communities to the ultra-rich boss. He promotes her to Co-editorial Director, placing her nervy 29-year-old self on par with her 56-year-old ex-boss, the man who had earlier hired her.

A Knotty Love Triangle

Before she can absorb these new workplace dynamics, her grandfather’s sudden death and legacy – she not only inherits the house, but also has to manage the family’s trust fund – requires her departure to Kolkata. The new boss accords her eight weeks of remote working, and she flies out without informing Seth, her sort-of boyfriend in an open relationship that permits his dating every other woman in sight. Earlier, she happened to read his unpublished manuscript, a work that he was intentionally not pitching to her. But she was riveted enough to show it to her firm. She turned into Seth’s editor too, forging a messy tangle of the personal and professional. However, her relationship with Seth, which is further complicated by her falling headlong into the arms and bed of a now-married ex, feels peripheral to the narrative.

Kolkata: A City of Secrets

The central story revolves around her family, and her own reckoning with her past. In New York, she meets a therapist, as most New Yorkers do. “Everyone in New York was ravaged by their love affairs and debt and childhoods, by race and geography and loneliness. In Kolkata, people had fewer problems, because one did not talk about them.” Such silences do not signify peace or harmony. Such silences threaten because of what they mask. Such silences are demanded of victims – the children of abusive parents, the wives of abusive husbands – until there’s an enraged bursting through the dam, given that the waters were always roiling.

Reckoning with the Past

The Lahiri mansion holds many such silences. Towards the end, their tight-lipped facades produce a startling reckoning, and as expected, another secret to be interred. All along, there’s a wedding being arranged and fiercely celebrated, imparting a sense that all joys are tinged with darker emotions, rage, greed, and the impotence of a fading gentry. As Lila observes of her unemployed uncles, Bengali men of that ilk drift through their hours: “For Rana, and so many Bengali men of his generation, no structure or purpose to their days and nights, time was infinite.” Women are not spared either. They become, as this novel shows, patriarchy’s most terrible perpetrators. Shattering tropes about nurturing Indian mothers – after Arundhati Roy’s memoir, Maya and Lila’s tie feels like a ghastlier mother-daughter relationship – the book forces us to confront sources of violence. Sometimes, or often, it starts with ourselves.

Fortunately, for Lila, after coming to terms with who her mother was, she seems to embody a break from her history. She, more than anyone else, knows that “[trauma] does not leave our bodies easily.” But repairs required to lighten its scars feel worth pursuing. We study history, even if it’s our own, to avert its mistakes.

References

Nayantara Roy, The Magnificent Ruins, Hachette India, 2026