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Toward the end of this book there's a short parenthetical aside about two young twin boys learning a board game. It says "(They are in the swell of their personalities, in their purest moment; they are impossible.)" It's a sweet moment and a dash of language that I found beautiful and poetic in its frivolity, and all too rare in this 600-page book. It comes just before a catastrophe that took the preceding 600 pages to convince us of its significance, so alien are the values at play to those of us unversed in the nuances of early-20th-century Indian caste-based society.

I really only know the caste system (broadly, ignorantly) as an unjust hierarchy that consigns a subset of people to squalor; this novel puts us in the shoes—the sandals? when one character acquires shoes they seem to be an unorthodox symbol of his progressivism re: caste—of people highly invested in it. But it certainly doesn't make their attitudes about it sympathetic, and I'm pretty sure it's not trying to. Ultimately it's just the story of a family in the midst of a time of strife- and division-causing political upheaval as various family members stake out their positions, and in that regard it works as a sort of anthropology study. Having read Howards End recently for my book club, I suppose The Toss of a Lemon was kind of an Indian version of that book, in a way. But the context was just too unfamiliar to me, and the story didn't place me in it in a way that made the characters or the stakes relatable.