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At the Tolstoy House, tucked within stately bungalows and manicured boulevards of Lutyens’ Delhi, Naina is cleaning up her mother’s blood. She knows what to do, what she has to do – what her Ma taught her to do. But her mind is still fractured, the blood is seeping onto her skin and somewhere deeper, where fear and complicity reside. After the last rites, when Naina returns to the house where the walls seem to absorb more than childhood memories, she thinks about her mother, sisters – but they linger in silence, aching, as if suspended in waiting. Naina’s accounts are interwoven with her mother Meera’s recollections. Meera Sehgal’s life has all the makings of perfect domesticity. A respectable husband, three daughters, a sprawling home – but under this facade of order lies dread, weighed down by generational trauma, expectation and silence.
Meera’s accounts ripple through marital bliss and the constant anxiety of not being enough – of being watched, conditioned to be perfect, to serve, to obey – as she is remade through an experiment, layer by layer, event by event. Rini, who seemingly is her best friend, is complicit in this. In Meera’s world, submission is a survival tactic, silence is tradition. Beyond the landscaped gardens and iron gates, Meera and her daughters are bound to roles carved by fear and unquestioned obedience. As Meera reminds herself and her daughters – wives, daughters, and sisters bear the weight of male failings; they are bound by unspoken rules and enduring pain, glorified as power.
Salt and silence in Lutyens’ Delhi
Arunima Tenzin Tara’s writing is visceral, precise and unflinching in exposing the terror of domestic abuse and emotional violence. Meera and her daughters confront the rules at different points in their lives, resulting in different outcomes for each but always too late to undo the damage, until Naina and her sister Sujata’s final act of defiance. Parallel to the grief and repression, Tara also creates this masterful, haunting imagery of blood as symbol, salt as omen and home as mausoleum. Rendering domestic horror with devastating intimacy, Meera, Naina, Sujata, Kavita, Lakshmi, Rini, Mei Wan’s stories unfold – where violence is quiet, surgical.
Even menstruation is a metaphor, a sacrificial cycle of tolerance – women bleed, absorb, endure, the system survives. Even then, absolute obedience offers no protection. One daughter who does everything right becomes invisible, just a vessel, her body treated as a means to an end. The other murdered and thrown away like trash, and another left alone as a bargain. A chillingly familiar situation in today’s world – a brutal truth: no amount of compliance can guarantee safety. Throughout the novel, Tara poses a relentless question: how much must one endure before the cycle ends? Or is this suffering a rhythm women are taught to accept? Through her characters, Tara asks: how deeply are these narratives and beliefs embedded in our lives – not only in the present, but in the stories we inherit?
The dark and provocative debut of the Tolstoy house at the very beginning of the novel acts like a reservoir of crime, intimate violence and exploitation. Crimes outside the walls are still a part of Tolstoy House; the fragments remain – they are always carried home, carried alongside the burden of the impossibility of truly knowing those closest to us, and the haunting ways we try.
Set not in the dark underbelly of the city but the sterile calm of a mansion, and when the truth unravels through the chapters, we see that the real darkness resides in the seemingly perfect Ambarish. Power in Tolstoy House is not just exercised – it is weaponised. The geography of the surroundings and the occasional portrayal of the lesser parts of the city, slums and brothels against the elite enclave of Barakhamba Road, reinforces the rigid hierarchy where privilege is preserved, and impunity thrives. In this world, figures like “Papa” are successful, men whose crimes are scrubbed clean, their sins overlooked. Murder victims, mutilated bodies become mere footnotes in the grand narrative of a city’s existence. Victims like Lakshmi are dismissed as collateral damage. At the beginning of their marriage, Ambarish slips out at night, leaving behind a trail of scattered salt, like a quiet warning of something sinister. The truth, when it unravels, is monstrous, but what hums through the pages with an eerie, unsettling energy is how Meera, Rini, Naina, Mei Wan, Sujata, and Kavita all become silent enforcers of crime and violence and only some survive.
Absorbing the blood, butchering the bodies, the use of salt is slowly revealed as an evil carried across time and space, deeply entrenched in patriarchal values – where crime isn’t loud or erratic but slow, patient, and methodical. What stands apart is the way the recurring motif of salt and blood is woven into the narrative, alongside the terrifying realisation of inheriting legacies of violence, especially in Naina’s role as mother. Tara is razor-sharp in her depiction of women’s bodies and their relationship with their children. Just as the acts of Ambarish survive on an unending exchange of power and pain, the description of events leading up to the final act of his evil monstrosity leaves the unmistakable acrid taste of salty blood on the reader’s mind.
Objects from the past – recipes, relics, and relationships
The novel also opens a window into a world where women, burdened with the task of absorbing every failure within the confines of a family, still find ways to support, comfort, and hold each other up. Meera and Lakshmi survive silently, tethered by the quiet trust they place in one another. Mei Wan shares recipes as a form of care and love, all while slowly acknowledging her own guilt and fear. There is also the persistent, painful reminder of how sibling relationships splinter under the weight of trauma and violence – how even when it is shared, trauma never looks the same on sisters raised in the same house. Objects from the past – recipes, relics, and relationships – carry their own weight and rot, they do not offer resolution. Instead, they offer witness. And that, in a world built on silence, is its own kind of rebellion.
The ending emerges with a rushed urgency, but what is undeniable is Tara’s precision and skill in crafting an unflinching narrative with vivid imagery. With searing clarity, The Ex-Daughters of Tolstoy House exposes layers of deep-seated misogyny – unsparing, and deeply attuned to the raw and terrible things that hide beneath money, influence, power, and violence – without softening, censoring, or romanticising. Tara’s prose lets readers feel the discomfort, asks them to gather meaning in the silences between the imagery – a voice unafraid of leaving an open wound. And that is the kind of control that, for a debut novel, is remarkable and certainly rare.
The Ex-Daughters of Tolstoy House, Arunima Tenzin Tara, Speaking Tiger Books.
This article first appeared on Scroll.in
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