Karan Mahajan's "The Complex"

Medaya Ocher and Eric Newman speak with Karan Mahajan about his latest novel, The Complex. Taking its name from the collection of buildings that patriarch SP Chopra built for his family in Delhi amid the fallout of the 1947 partition crisis, the novel explores how Chopra's descendants struggle to escape the pull of an overbearing family and the long shadow cast by their storied ancestor. As they seek to wrest the lives they want from their surroundings, buried secrets and the tectonic forces of a rising Hindu nationalist movement threaten to tear them all apart. Medaya, Eric, and Karan discuss the transformation of India from the 1970s through the 1990s, the flight from family as both opportunity and wound, and what it means to live with and through buried family secrets.