Yeh Hai Mohabbatein- Chat Club#2 - Page 76

Raman and Shagun, a couple with two children, reap the monetary benefits and accompanying lifestyle of his work at the Brand, a company that invests largely in the manufacture of soft drinks.

Into the picture comes Ashok, Raman's boss at the Brand. As Shagun begins a passionate affair with Ashok, she finds herself struggling to define her roles as wife, mother and lover. When she asks Raman for a divorce, he descends into anger and self-pity as his perfect life unravels around him.

At the other end of the city, in a colony governed by far more traditional bonds, Ishita, a young divorcee, strives to find satisfaction in independence and social work. She is drawn to the divorced Raman and the temptation of familial fulfilment, which has so far evaded her.

Amid the demands and hysterics of the four grown-ups in this tale of broken marriages, the children remain quietly in the background until the novel's second half. It is then that we begin to see the disastrous side-effects of the bitter fight for their custody, the "tyranny of blood", and their trauma, "torn between two mothers, two homes, two countries".

Kapur's book reveals the unimagined uncertainties of matrimony. The wife's sense of suffocation, the husband's fear of loneliness and the constant shifting of the children, like commodities, from one home to the other, are evoked with painstaking sincerity.

Although marriage is well-trodden territory for Kapur, here her possession of the subject is complete. In the accumulation of detail, and her tone of emotional restraint, Custody becomes something more than just a social commentary, but a novel that is true to the universal angst of modern marriage, with its burden of individualism.