The Friendship She Keeps

Description

Being alone is not the same as being lonely.

Manisha Kulkarni left Mumbai for Harvard, found love in the seat beside her, and built a life with Robert Maclean in a “common country” that belonged to neither of them — Singapore. Forty noisy, happy years followed: careers, two children, and a flat full of voices under the rain trees of Queenstown.

Then the children grew up and flew away — to Boston, to Paris — busy, loving, and very far. And one ordinary Thursday morning, Robert did not come home.

Alone at sixty-four, with the kettle filled for one, Manisha does something her family never expected. She brings home a humanoid companion and names it Sakha — “friend.” It learns to make her mother’s tea, takes her to the doctor, catches her failing heart in the middle of the night, dances with her to old Hindi songs, and walks beside her, step by step, back into the world.

Tender, funny and deeply human, The Friendship She Keeps is a novel about growing old, about families scattered across the globe — and about the friendships, of every kind, that carry us home.

SUDARSAN KASTURI
FICTION