The Wedding of Jayanthi Mandel

The Mandel family is rich, powerful and superstitious. Twenty years ago things were very different when they arrived in Calcutta, starving and penniless, intent on making their fortune. Now, Papa Mandel, ruthless architect of the Mandel success story, is dead but his spirit lives on in his unwitting daughter Jayanthi.

Jayanthi is an avid reader of romantic magazines, and the plans for her marriage -a marriage of convenience which will further extend the Mandel influence -seem depressingly loveless to her; the more so as the wedding day approaches and increasingly bloody events surround the Mandel clan as they jostle for power.

Observing the gathering pandemonium and providing a bemused commentary on events is Police Deputy Babu, a sycophant by nature, whose attempts to gain promotion are continually thwarted, and whose efforts to keep in with the Mandels are largely self-defeating.

The violence and scheming and confusion come to a head on the day of Jayanthis wedding - but no one, not even the spirit of Papa Mandel, has predicted the extraordinary course the day is to take.

The Wedding of Jayanthi Mandel is an original and powerful work. The authentic feel of India is caught - its extremes, its mysticism, its beauty, the voices of its people. And underlying the drama is a detached and ironic humour which both illuminates and enriches this remarkable novel.

The daughter of a novelist, Sara Banerji spent part of her childhood in the African bush. She married an Oxford under-graduate from India and they spent the first seventeen years of their married life in the South Indian Hills tea planting and bring-ing up three daughters. During that time Sara rode as a jockey on the flat and held exhibitions of her paintings in Madras and Delhi.