Intermission by Subramaniam, Nirupama

He wondered why he, forty-four-year-old successful entrepreneur, faithful husband and competent father of a sixteen-year-old boy, a man with thestolidity of half his life behind him and the certainty of what lay ahead, should wait every morning for a glimpse of this girl, like a teenager in the first throes of an infatuation. From the author of the best-selling Keep the Change comes a new novel about Delhi’s suburbia. Set in Gurgaon, the dazzling face of modernity in India, Intermission takes us into the lives of Varun and Gayatri Sarin, not-so-happilymarried corporate couple with a typically NRI problem: settling back in chaotic India after several years spent in an ordered existence in the First World. Varun is pleased to be back and running his own business; Gayatri yearns for her friends and her life in the US and dislikes the transparently divisive society she has been flung back into. From inquisitive in-laws and absconding staff to potholes and pigs on the roads, there is a new difficulty to be tackled every day. Not to mention a teenage son with raging hormones. Then Varun meets Sweety, young mother – of – twins, who is living her dream of life in a nuclear family, and everything changes. For him, for Sweety, and insidiously, for everyone around them. A beautifully told story of illicit love and divided loyalties, Intermission is suburban fiction at its best.