Custody

About the book

Custody is a novel by Manju Kapur, published by Faber & Faber in 2011. It is her fifth novel, following Difficult Daughters (1998), A Married Woman (2002), Home (2006) and The Immigrant (2008). The book is set in Delhi in the late 1990s, in the years when India's economy was opening up and foreign goods and foreign companies were arriving in the capital. Like Kapur's earlier novels, it is a close study of upper-middle-class family life, but its subject is the one her earlier books circled without entering: divorce. When a marriage breaks, the novel asks, who pays, and who decides what happens to the children? At 432 pages, it is a long, detailed portrait of two marriages coming apart and a third being built from their wreckage.

What happens in Custody?

The novel opens in a Delhi that looks, from the outside, perfect. Raman, a marketing executive at a global drinks company, and his beautiful wife Shagun have two children, Arjun and Roohi, and a comfortable life in the city's new-money colonies. Then Raman's new boss arrives: Ashok Khanna, a suave senior executive sent to rescue the company's business in India. Shagun, bored by the flawless routine of her marriage, begins an affair with him, and when she asks Raman for a divorce, he refuses. What follows is a long and ugly fight. Shagun keeps the children from him and uses them as leverage; Raman answers with expensive gifts and promises, trying to buy their affection back. The courts become a second battlefield, where lawyers and hearings decide who the children live with and who pays for what.

Into this broken household comes Ishita, a young woman whose own marriage has ended because she cannot have children, and who has been sent away by her husband's family. She marries Raman and becomes Arjun and Roohi's stepmother, determined to build the family she was denied. But the courts threaten the security of her new home, and when Shagun fights for the children again, Ishita must decide what she is willing to risk to keep them. The novel ends with the family remade but scarred: the children have watched their parents use them as pieces in a game, and the adults have learned how much a divorce can cost everyone it touches.

Shagun, Raman and Ishita

Kapur builds the novel around three adults, each of whom the reader is invited to judge and then to understand. Shagun is beautiful, restless and hungry for a larger life than the one her marriage offers, and her affair with Ashok is presented as both a search for freedom and a selfish act with terrible costs. Raman is a hard-working, responsible man who loves his children and cannot understand why his wife is leaving him; his refusal to grant a divorce is both a wound and a weapon. Ashok Khanna, the boss, is the catalyst: charming and well connected, able to open doors to good schools, and careless about the damage he leaves behind. Ishita is the novel's moral centre. Divorced and childless in a society that measures a woman by her children, she finds in Raman's children a second chance at motherhood, and her fight to keep them is the fight of a woman who has already lost one family and will not lose another. Around them, the children Arjun and Roohi watch everything: old enough to understand that they are wanted, young enough to be pulled in both directions.

Children caught in the middle: the novel's themes

The novel's sharpest writing is about what divorce does to children. Arjun and Roohi are not innocent bystanders: they are the prize. Both parents bribe them, coach them and use their love as a weapon, and the courts, for all their procedure, cannot see what the children see. Kapur also writes about the two taboos that shape her heroines: infidelity and infertility. Shagun's affair breaks the rules of her marriage and her class; Ishita's inability to have children ends her first marriage and defines her second. Set against the Delhi of the late 1990s, the novel catches a moment when money, foreign brands and new jobs were changing what Indian families expected from marriage, and when women with education and ambition were beginning to ask for more than the roles their mothers had accepted. The courts are a constant presence: a maze of procedure, slow and expensive, that turns private pain into public contest.

The author

Manju Kapur was born in Amritsar in 1948 and taught English literature at Miranda House, University of Delhi, for almost thirty years. Her first novel, Difficult Daughters (1998), won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for Best First Book and became a bestseller in India; it told the story of a Punjabi woman in 1940s Amritsar and Lahore who fights for an education. A Married Woman (2002) and Home (2006) followed, each a close study of middle-class Delhi family life, and The Immigrant (2008) took her characters to Canada. Kapur has said she identified most with Raman, the father traumatised by the loss of his children. She lives in New Delhi.

Reception and legacy

Custody was widely read but divided reviewers. Readers praised Kapur's eye for the detail of upper-middle-class Delhi life and the unnerving honesty with which she shows parents treating their children as commodities in a divorce. The most persistent criticism is that the children themselves stay at the edges of the story: Arjun and Roohi are shown as pawns in their parents' game and only gain a voice of their own towards the end. One reviewer called the book a summer read that is easily forgotten after the last page, while others valued it as Kapur's most focused study of how legal structures shape private lives. Whatever the verdict, the book found a second life on television. Yeh Hai Mohabbatein, the Star Plus serial based on Custody, ran from 3 December 2013 to 18 December 2019 for 1,895 episodes, one of the longest-running Indian television dramas, and it carried the story of Raman, Ishita and Shagun far beyond the novel's readership, with remakes in several Indian languages.