Fiction: Sophia struggles with her parents’ break up and the various turmoils in 21st-century India

So, it’s happened. No, that’s not quite right. It’s been happening. It’s been building up slowly and steadily. And now finally with a resounding force, the constructs of what I, as a privileged Indian, know to be safe, familiar and real have collapsed. Despite my education, access and partial NRI advantages, even my half-Hindu lineage, I have been reduced to what my last name denotes. I think of how having to build a life outside the country has robbed my father of a sense of rootedness, an inability to call one place his own. He’s postponed his retirement because he’s not sure how to return to today’s India. The colony he grew up in now has houses marked with saffron flags and routine morchas taken out by men, frothing at the mouth with chants of “Hindu khatray mein hai”, “Jai Shri Ram” and “Mandir yahin banaenge” – the war cries of a lost generation.

I sit on the floor in the middle of the new apartment I’ve recently leased at a highly subsidised rate from a friend’s family. Cardboard boxes pile up around me, taped and marked with labels – books, clothes, kitchen stuff, medical reports, electronics. The apartment’s situated in…

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