Nayantara Roy’s ‘The Magnificent Ruins’ is a gripping novel about family, identity, and immigrant experience. The novel follows Lila De, a New York-based book editor whose rising career is interrupted when she inherits her family’s Kolkata ancestral home, which she left behind sixteen years ago. Her return forces a strained reunion with her mother and a hostile extended family, none of whom welcome her sudden claim.
As she navigates these strained relationships, Lila must also confront her resurfacing first love and a shifting dynamic with her on-again, off-again partner. Caught between past and present, she begins to uncover long-buried family secrets that threaten to unravel everything.
Author Nayantara Roy traces the novel’s origins to her graduate studies, where a class titled “Other People’s Secrets” inspired an essay about a mother and daughter that later became the book’s inspiration. Here is an excerpt from the book.
Book Excerpt: The Magnificent Ruins
It had become customary for me to wake in the middle of the night and spend a few hours reading emails and editing manuscript drafts. An odd email from Seth, with no subject, said: Went to RedFarm and ordered our duck dumplings/can you send me your address? I hoped it was to send me a completed draft of his manuscript, though I knew that he could not have made enough progress and would look askance at what shipping a hard copy to India might cost. Perhaps he wanted to send me some form of an apology for yelling at me—a grand gesture of frozen duck dumplings that would be intercepted by customs before they left JFK.
At some stage of early dawn, I fell asleep again, my hands still on my keyboard, enveloped in Iva’s voluminous pillows. In the center of a haze of a dream, Molly and I were trying to swim in an ocean, but she kept passing me, stronger and faster, her golden-bronze skin rippling in the warm blue green water. Exhausted, I kept trying to keep pace and catch up, tiny ripples of jealousy coursing through me, as Molly laughed, flitting through the waters, eternally at home in the waves, calling to me, “Lila, Lila, Lila”—until I finally caught up, and it was my mother instead.
I woke to an insistent ringing in my ears. It was my laptop, still open in front of me. I reached for the glass of water on the nightstand, swallowing as pressed answer on FaceTime. “Hi, Mol.”
“Lila, I’ve been calling and calling. Where were you?”
“Sorry,” I said, weary, rubbing my eyes.
“Did you just wake up?” she asked, peering at the screen.
“It’s seven a.m. here,” I said. “How are the Carnival books coming? Ready for the announcement?”
“It’s been crazy, just trying to coordinate between all of these departments for the announcement. Phenom has so much paperwork and protocol, for every little thing. I miss how small we used to be—is that crazy?”
“It’s not crazy. I miss it too. But we have more resources, right? More nice things?”
“Yeah.” Molly sounded glum. “A lot of trainings, though.”
“And a Booker nomination. That’s got to be making Aetos pretty happy, right?” I tried to muster false cheer, even as I felt anxious, so far away from a rapidly evolving workplace that everyone but me was learning how to navigate. Phenom was an alien mothership that had absorbed Wyndham whole, and I worried about not being able to recognize my beloved company by the time I returned to Brooklyn.
“Yeah, yeah,” Molly said, distracted. “Nadine Emecheta called out of the blue with a fucking fever dream of a series about immigrant kids in a Kentucky high school, with superpowers born of their traumas. Aetos and Gil were over the moon.”
Molly ran her hands through her hair, a halo around her face, backlit by a lamp. I raised a hand self-consciously to my own curls, untamable in the Indian humidity.
“But the Phenom people have already started asking about things like ‘commercial viability’ and ‘PR potential,’” said Molly. “All talk, no taste.”
I laughed at Molly’s perfect sinister imitation of the marketing department at Phenom. “All that tasteless money you’ll soon be going to the Hamptons with,” I said.
“Anyway, do you miss us?” asked Molly, impatient. “I can’t wait for you to come back and be the boss.”
“I do,” I said, feeling a stab in my chest. “So much. It’s like living on another planet.”
Hurry up and come back, then. We miss you. Seth asks about you, you know. I saw him at a book party the other night. We went out and got beers.”
“I wish he’d email and ask me, and maybe even answer my questions about the draft he was supposed to have finished two weeks ago.”
Molly laughed. “Ah, Li, that mind of yours, never too far from business. He’s into you, you know.”
I fidgeted, as I did when Molly or Gil, the only two people who knew, brought up Seth as my lover.
“He’s into sleeping with me,” I said. “Just like he’s into sleeping with half of New York City. I’m like his regular-order martini. Doesn’t mean he’s not drinking everything else on the menu.”
Molly laughed, her head thrown back, magnificent. “You’re such an idiot sometimes. Okay, I just wanted to make sure you were good. I have to go—it’s Gil’s fifty-seventh tonight.”
“Right,” I said, desolate. Time had ceased to exist in the same way for me that it had in New York. “Call me tomorrow, then?” I asked, hopeful. “I want to hear about everything that’s going on.”
“Can’t. I have a date, a second date, tomorrow. Guy I met at Henry Public. He was reading Austen. I offered him my fries. He said yes.”
“What? No. I have to know everything.”
“He’s cute. A real dork. Funny glasses, nice sweater. I want to do unspeakable things.”
“Mm. Sounds like a dream.”
“Li, I miss you,” said Molly, suddenly serious. “Without you here, it isn’t the same.”
I nodded. In the way that many in our generation did, Molly and I had appointed each other chosen family. Without her, my life felt as if it lacked a central yoke.
“I talked to Harriet yesterday,” I said. “I know you’ve been covering for me with Gil and Aetos, checking in on my submissions and making it seem like I’m on top of things at the weekly meetings. Harriet told me.”
Molly shrugged. “You’d do it if I flew halfway across the world to clean up some funny business.”
I laughed. “God, that’s accurate. And if only you could see how I keep making it a bigger mess on the reg.”
Molly leaned forward. “Lila, you’re the most calm, organized person I know. It’s ridiculous, and we know it comes from your need to control, but, babe, there never was a better time to have some confidence in your abilities.”
“You know, it might have something to do with you,” I said, rueful.
“Maybe I just need you to be myself.”
She shook her head. “You don’t, but I want you to keep thinking that, because it’s really me that needs you. This is the longest we’ve gone since college without talking every day. I can’t make sense of men or my sister or Gil’s damn guest list without you.”
“Have we ever been this nice to each other? We should say these things aloud more often.”
“Yes, we have. And, yes, we should.” She blew a kiss at me. “I really do have to go now,” she said. “I’m in charge of Gil’s cake.”
“Tell him I say happy birthday,” I said unhappily.
“I’ll call you this weekend. Love you.”
“I love you, Mol.”
“Bye.”
She was gone before the computer could end the call. I huddled back into the pillows. It was only natural, that eight thousand miles away, things would change, even in the space of the few days I had been gone, that events would occur without me in them and the gap of my existence would shorten and fill with the existence of new stories, none of which I would understand fully, having not been there. I felt silly and melodramatic as I blinked back tears, wondering what it was about the Lahiri family that had made me leave my life in Brooklyn so far behind.
Eventually, I padded to the kitchen for toast, wrapped in a robe that could only have belonged to Iva. My doorbell rang, a musical birdsong, unlike the outsize single jangle of the buzzer attached to the main entrance of my mother’s house.
Ram Bhai stood outside, serious, holding a small piece of paper. “Six hundred rupees,” he said.
“What is it for?” I asked in Bengali, taking the note. It was a white scrap of a notebook sheet with a hasty 600 scrawled on it.
“Newspaper,” he said in Hindi, solemn as he examined the pink flamingos on my green robe.
“Six hundred? That’s”—I calculated—“twenty rupees a day. For one paper?”
He nodded.
“But the paper costs four rupees.”
“Delivery charge,” he said.
“But that’s outrageous. Delivery can’t be four times the cost of the paper. Can you negotiate?”
“Yes,” he said, taking the note back. “How much?”
“I don’t know. What does he charge you?”
“I read the Bengali newspaper, so it’s only two rupees extra for delivery. Yours is English.”
“That’s ridiculous. He can’t charge me higher delivery fees for language,” I said, heated.
Ram Bhai nodded again. “How much?”
“Four rupees for paper, four for delivery. Two hundred and forty for the month.”
Ram Bhai looked impressed. “Difficult,” he said, “but let me try.”
Bargaining was a prized skill in the city, and while it bordered on criminal when my grandmother asked the farmers to sell her their fruit at cost, I wasn’t willing to be advertised as the American who paid three times what the neighbors did for her English paper.
Ram Bhai turned to leave.
“And your mother is downstairs,” he said.
Extracted from Nayantara Roy’s ‘The Magnificent Ruins’, published by Hachette India.
