The Flat on Malabar Hill

About the Book

Piety and religious devotion run alongside addiction and bigotry in a Mumbai family. Told from multiple view points, The Flat on Malabar Hill pits traditional values against modern ways in an ethnic novel which spans two continents and three decades. In this family, two sons provide devout mother Shanti and morally upright father Vinod their greatest joy and deepest anguish. Kishore is handsome, brilliant, and an MIT graduate. His Americanized wife, Anjali, has spent years in the U.S. and struggles to adjust to Mumbai. The younger son Dev plays drums at nightclubs and shares drugs with his idle rich friends. When he wants to marry an uneducated, low-caste, Anglo-Indian night-club singer, Vinod threatens to disown him. Years later, Vinod has bypass surgery and Shanti is diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. Kishore, a member of the sandwich generation, uproots his family from Seattle, where he works for Microsoft, and moves them into the Malabar Hill flat, which his father deeds over to him. Anjali begins to redecorate, but each brush stroke erases Shanti’s and Vinod’s memories. Shanti’s mind continues to fade, and Vinod feels powerless to help her. He makes a momentous decision, leaving a painful legacy for the family.

About the Author

Chitra Kallay was born in Bangalore, India. She moved to the United States to do post-graduate work in English and Journalism. She settled in California and taught English for several years at Harvard-Westlake, a college prep school in Los Angeles. She lives in Santa Monica, California.