' THE COMPLEX ' : BOOK REVIEW SNIPPET

'' The Complex. By Karan Mahajan. '' : The late great S.P. Chopra, the fictional politician whose influence forever looms over the characters in Karan Mahajan's new novel, was more of a prolific father than an attentive one.

With a long illustrious record of public service, [ framer of India's Constitution, governor of its Reserve Bank, he seemed to belong as much to the nation as to his family.]

One might trace this back to his relationship with his own father, whom he did not meet until he was 12, after the elder Chopra was advised by an astrologer that any sight of his newborn son's face would kill him.

Now, S.P. lives posthumously in the heads of his nine adult children less as a collection of memories than as a vague but crushing set of patrimonial expectations.

His emotional legacy may be murky, but his material one takes the very concrete form of two multistory buildings in Delhi.

These have been divided haphazardly into apartments in which more than 20 of his descendants and their families live in irritable proximity : the '' Complex '' of the novel's title.

[ '' Compound '' might have been a better word for this real-estate setup, but of course it lacks the piquant alternative meanings.]

While it is true that Delhi prices make both the property and the land extremely valuable, the Complex itself is no palace :

'' Old paints on the wall, more powder in places - paint chosen by her father and never recoated. Old black switches, the wires running in covered platter rails along the walls.

To live in this house was to live inside their father's mind : half village, half city.''

S.P's heirs have the means, and sometimes the desire, to leave home, even to emigrate to the West ; but family's dynamics, good or bad, tend to pull them back. 

Thus the novel's field of action - at first quite global, with long interludes in Michigan and in London-  gradually contract to this claustrophobic setting, where there is so little space that the returning family members squabble who has the right to build new rooms on the roof, or in the dilapidated servants' quarters.

The World Students Society thanks Jonathan Dee.