No End To The Journey - Tapa dura

Gopalakrishnan (Gopu to his family and friends), a sixty-five-year-old retired civil servant, has recently and reluctantly returned home to the southern Indian village of Paavalampatti after a forty-year career in New Delhi. His father is dead, and his mother - aging and unwell - wants her son to take care of her in her dotage. His wife, Parvati, is none too happy to be back. Their only child, Suresh, has stayed behind in New Delhi to oversee a presumably successful construction business.
When Suresh unexpectedly comes home, ostensibly to commemorate Diwali, the Festival of Lights, the fractures that have long existed beneath the surface of the family are suddenly thrust into sharp relief, and Gopalakrishnan finds that he must act as patriarch under difficult circumstances.

S. Shankar is an associate professor of English and the director of the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

S. Shankar is an associate professor of English and the director of the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He is the author of one previous novel, A Map of Where I Live (Heinemann, 1997), books of poetry and literary criticism, and editor of Crossing into America: The New Literature of Immigration (New Press). His stories and poetry have appeared in numerous literary magazines. He lives in Hawaii.