The book begins and ends with the visits to give the impression of a tunnel into their ancestors and family history. I believe in going backwards into the past - I felt I was digging a tunnel back to the past.

The growing tension between them reaches its climax when Maya kills Gautama and then commits suicide. Career
Desai publiAnita Desaid her first novel Cry The Peacock in 1963. Maya has tenderness softness and warmth and Gautama is hard and cold.

As a writer Anita Desai has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize three times; Anita Desai received a Sahitya Akademi Award in 1978 for her novel Fire on the Mountain from the Sahitya Akademi India's National Academy of Letters; Anita Desai won the British Guardian Prize for The Village by the Sea. Burchard Professor of Humanities at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.