Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
There’s a timeless quality to Geetanjali Shree’s 2001 novel Tirohit, now published in the UK in Rahul Soni’s nimble 2013 translation from Hindi as The Roof Beneath Their Feet. The story follows the friendship of two women across class divides. Like Shree’s fifth novel, Tomb of Sand, translated by Daisy Rockwell — the first Indian-language title to win the 2022 International Booker Prize — this earlier work resists a strictly linear narrative. While Tomb of Sand explores the legacy of geographical and religious borders, here Shree is concerned with class, gender and female desire.
The novel is narrated from three perspectives that subtly layer and alter our perception. We hear first from Bitva, who has just lost his mother, Chachcho. He is dismayed when her friend Lalna returns to mourn with him. There’s a breathless energy to the opening as Bitva recalls himself as a small boy running across the rooftop of Laburnum House: “A neighbourhood of a hundred or so houses that existed in one huge building stretching far and wide, that lay drowning for centuries under the rolling, sea-like roof.”
The rooftop is a place where boundaries are transgressed, where the children of the mohalla (neighbourhood) play, women relax away from the male gaze and lovers meet in the shadow of the water tanks. It’s where the inhabitants are spied on through the skylights and where gossip thrives. It’s also where Bitva’s own origin story is given free rein in his imagination. This stands in stark contrast to the homes below where lives are restricted and societal rules must be followed. Shree, who grew up in Uttar Pradesh, treats this milieu with wry, incisive humour.
Against this backdrop, we learn how Chachcho rescued her neighbour Lalna after witnessing her mistreatment by the men in her extended family, bringing her into the home she shares with her husband, Uncle Om, and offering her protection.
Lalna narrates the second part, and Shree keeps us guessing with frequent shifts between rumour and truth. Did Lalna have an affair with Om, or was she in love with Chachcho, and who is Bitva’s real mother? As fragments from their past emerge, “the seesaw of friendship” is gradually revealed as they support, compete with, and complement one another. For Lalna: “She, the certitude in my new life — I, the freedom in hers.” Her invisibility gives her a degree of autonomy, which she bestows on Chachcho by fetching a burka so she can accompany Lalna to the cinema and on other adventures.
Over the years, Chachcho adds Lalna’s name to bank papers and share certificates, which help make her a wealthy woman, but arouse suspicion and resentment among the neighbours — and Bitva — who in effect ostracise her for daring to act above her station. Lalna is “ignored” until she tries to make something of herself. She observes: “If you stay where you belong, people respect you. But if you try to move out of that pigeonhole, it makes them uneasy.”
The short final part, written in the third person, adopts a more dispassionate tone. Shree moves fluidly between timeframes, mirroring memory to build tension, while the rhythmic prose in Soni’s translation draws attention to the characters’ interior lives.
The compassion at the heart of the novel is deeply satisfying. As Lalna recognises: “It doesn’t matter if one is from a distinguished family and the other from nowhere . . . They have the same gushing hearts, the same bleeding bodies, the same desire to capture the colours of the rainbow.”
The Roof Beneath Their Feet by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Rahul Soni And Other Stories £14.99, 184 pages
Join our online book group on Facebook at FT Books Café and follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X