The Complex by Karan Mahajan review – a superb family saga set in Delhi

We learn about the murder of the Chopra clan’s shifty, crude, charismatic patriarch Laxman in the opening pages of The Complex. Twenty-five years have passed, but the stain on this once-respectable Punjabi family remains. The man who did it, Laxman’s nephew Brij, has served his jail time and is about to be released. Some relatives think Brij is too dangerous, too shameful to return to the family home, but his son Mohit decides the pair will live together – and rewinds the clock to tell the story of the decades leading up to the crime.

Karan Mahajan’s warmly received first two works, Family Planning and The Association of Small Bombs, explored individual lives alongside larger forces – urban development in the former, a car bomb’s traumatic aftermath in the latter. His excellent third novel has Delhi at its heart, but also visits Indian villages and cities, the American midwest and London, its short chapters flitting between different members of the Chopra family. You start by nodding in appreciation at Mahajan’s observant character portraits; before you know it you’re waist-deep in frustration, corruption and betrayal, as the book ranges through politics, faith, migration, infidelity and entrepreneurship.

The main stage for Mahajan’s epic yet grubby tale is the residential compound that gives the novel its name. This sun-eaten collection of flats and bungalows in the Delhi suburbs became the family’s base in the post-independence glory days of SP Chopra, a freedom fighter turned politician and businessman. Since his death from a boardroom heart attack, his nine children and their descendants have never quite lived up to his reputation, and the complex has become the increasingly ramshackle home of several couples and their offspring. Family members swap gossip, chide their servants and tussle for the best apartments, flouting building regulations and each other’s wishes as they go.

SP’s elder children are mostly distant figures, and instead we follow the youngest, Laxman, who half-heartedly runs a bobby pin factory and a local temple; Brij, a military pilot turned paper-mill manager; and Brij’s younger brother Sachin, who moves to Michigan to develop squeezable plastic sauce bottles. Around these would-be giants of industry, women find what power and release they can. Laxman’s wife Archana sneaks on to the complex roof for cigarettes and privacy, while Brij’s wife Karishma walks the weedy garden. In the US, Sachin and his wife, Gita, have both more space and more isolation, but the rest of the Chopras are never far away: on visits they demand tea at all hours and comment on the pair’s problems conceiving. The swaggering, entitled Laxman makes grim lunges at both Gita and Karishma.

As the 70s become the 80s, Sachin and Gita return to Delhi while Laxman, Karishma and Brij join forces to produce a line of ayurvedic balms. Children cram for exams and play cricket; adults bicker, hatch plans and do their best to ignore the increasingly blatant infidelity in their midst. Outside the complex, socialist governments become increasingly pro-business, Indira Gandhi is assassinated and Hindu nationalism rises. Laxman at first tries to mollify tensions, before becoming a vital player in a fledgling party that seeks to inflame them: the BJP.

This is a novel at a constant simmer, packed with characters who are all deeply flawed and often deeply awful. Everyone plays the game to one degree or other, confident problems can be solved by money, force of personality or the right favour from the right person. But the Chopras are fraying, and the Complex is at once a palace and prison, with its “glum black water tankies; the clotheslines savagely crossing the roofs; everything sloping toward death”.

Mahajan’s skill at getting into his characters’ heads means The Complex doesn’t feel as bleak as that image might suggest: it’s a wonderfully immersive and in-the-moment work. There’s beauty here, in marble temple floors “the colour of a thunderstorm”, or the image of Gita tightening her shawl to protect her “inky Banarasi silk sari from the cinders whizzing like miniature glowing kites” – as well as kindness, particularly in the sweet relationship between Gita and her nephews.

But the darkness is rendered just as vividly: cruel conversations around the snack table, vengeful nationalism, caste snobbery, the almost surreal horror of communal violence, Laxman’s grasping hands. This is a fine piece of work, at once a grand sweep through history and a domestic novel of petty squabbles. Mahajan drops enough breadcrumbs as he goes that the Chopras’ journey towards murder and radicalism feels less like a twist and more like a procession – but one packed with drama and life.