Climbing the Stairs by Padma Venkatraman

Soon we were shaking the branches, watching the ripe purple fruit rain onto the rug like a monsoon shower.

I spread an old rug on the ground beneath the tree and climbed up after him, scraping my skin against its lumpy bark. Our dog, Raja, was yapping loudly on the ground, wagging his tail. Kitta was eighteen and he’d just started college, but though his voice had recently deepened and the first fuzzy promise of a black mustache shadowed his upper lip, he still looked more a boy than a man. My brother’s brown legs were already wrapped around the roughness of the main trunk, clinging on like a monkey to its mother’s body. I had folded up my ankle-length skirt and was getting ready to climb up the jamun tree. Whispers of heat rose from the tar road and shivered toward the slumbering Arabian Sea. The drive was drenched with the juice of fallen jamun fruit and the sand of Mahim beach gleamed like a golden plate in the afternoon sunlight. I still remember the day we celebrated Krishna Jayanthi, the festival of Lord Krishna’s birth, at our home in Bombay. 'synopsis' may belong to another edition of this title. Read Padma Venkatraman's posts on the Penguin Blog. Climbing the Stairs is a powerful story about love and loss set against a fascinating historical backdrop.

Padma Venkatraman’s debut novel poignantly shows a girl struggling to find her place in a mixedup world. But when Vidya’s brother makes a choice the family cannot condone, and when Raman seems to want more than friendship, Vidkya must question all she has believed in. There she meets Raman, a young man also living in the house who relishes her intellectual curiosity. Vidya’s only refuge becomes her grandfather’s upstairs library, which is forbidden to women. But when her forward-thinking father is beaten senseless by the British police, she is forced to live with her grandfather’s large traditional family, where the women live apart from the men and are meant to be married off as soon as possible. During World War II and the last days of British occupation in India, fifteen-year-old Vidya dreams of attending college.

Climbing the Stairs by Padma Venkatraman