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. The love affair, forming the heart of this portrait of a modern woman, is doomed from the start. Farida is vivacious, voluptuous, intelligent, and rich, not to mention spoiled, selfish, and talented, but her life is hardly as rosy as the appearance suggests and erupts finally 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.