A BREATH OF FRESH AIR

Rich in insight into Indian culture and psychology, A Breath of Fresh Air resonates with meaning and the abiding power of love.

On the night of December 3, 1984, Anjali waits for her army officer husband to pick her up at the train station in Bhopal, India. In an instant, her world changes forever. Her anger at his being late turns to horror when a catastrophic gas leak poisons the city air. Anjali miraculously survives. Her marriage does not.

A smart, successful schoolteacher, Anjali is now remarried to Sandeep, a loving and stable professor. Their lives would be nearly perfect, if not for their young son’s declining health. But when Anjali’s first husband suddenly reappears in her life, she is thrown back to the troubling days of their marriage with a force that impacts everyone around her.

Her first husband’s return brings back all the uncertainty Anjali thought time and conviction had healed–about her decision to divorce, and about her place in a society that views her as scandalous for having walked away from her arranged marriage. As events unfold, feelings she had guarded like gold begin to leak away from her, spreading out into the world and challenging her once firm beliefs.

In a landscape as intriguing as it is unfamiliar, Anjali’s struggles to reconcile the roles of wife and ex-wife, working woman and mother, illuminate both the fascinating duality of the modern Indian woman and the difficult choices all women must make.

EDITIONS

Release: June 2002 (Hardcover); June 2003 (Paperback)
Publisher: Ballantine Books (US)
Bantam Books, Australia (2002)
Penguin Books, India (2003)
Random House Mondadori, Spain (2009)

I held the edge of my sari to my nose, hoping to dissipate some of the spice in the air, but nothing would make the air clean.

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