Book Review| The Ex Daughters of Tolstoy House

“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” This line from Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina has been so often quoted that it has taken on a life of its own. Tolstoy’s tragedy was set in Russian high society of the 19th century. Cut to contemporary Delhi, the setting of Arunima Tenzin Tara’s debut novel, The Ex Daughters of Tolstoy House. Arunima’s tale zooms in on Meera’s family. Married to successful surgeon Ambarish Sehgal for over 40 years, Meera has three daughters: Sujata, Kavita and Naina. Their home, Tolstoy House, is nestled in the insular heart of Lutyens’ Delhi. The novel opens with Meera’s death. The task of cleaning up Meera’s bloodied body and bloodied room goes to Naina. Ambarish orders his heartbroken daughter to get the job done. Sujata, his eldest, is on the run. Kavita, the middle child, is no longer among the living. That makes them both ‘ex daughters’ of the macabre Tolstoy House.

The Ex Daughters of Tolstoy House checks all the boxes of the gothic horror genre. It features a grand mansion—home of dark family secrets and of a vicious man. An air of looming dread; unease lurking behind the family’s well-oiled daily routine. Blood (lots of it). Violence. Supernatural elements. The past forever present, shaping the lives of the characters, bearing them back “ceaselessly into the past”. Gothic fiction, which has been haunting readers since the mid-19th century, uses these tropes to lay bare the anatomy of evil, to explore the darkest corners of the human psyche, to shine the light on aspects of human existence society would rather sweep under a collective carpet.

At Tolstoy House, the veneer is polished. The father is considered a good provider. The family home boasts of an exclusive address in the capital. Ambarish gives his daughters all the material comforts they could possibly want. He pays for their education. He takes them and their mother for holidays. There are birding trips, too, since he is an avid birdwatcher. Plenty of ‘normal’ family stuff goes on at Tolstoy House. Meera whips up delicious feasts with a little help from Lakshmi Amma, who has worked for them since the kids were toddlers. Sunday lunch is a beloved family tradition. But secrets hover over that meal too. As children, the girls love their house and the “family lunches on Sundays, mango-stained t-shirts, the yellow of fish curry, of lemon rubbed corn on the cob on rainy afternoons, summer holidays and single stems of sunflowers the size of your face.” But the house is as large as it is suffocating. There are rules to be followed. For instance, “big gulps of air are not encouraged” here. There is a list of things, drawn up by Ambarish, which they are “not allowed to mention” outside the olive-green gates of Tolstoy House. Very few visitors come to the house. And the parents keep watch on the girls’ every move.

The novel squarely places the institution of family under the scanner and asks: what Ambarish does is grotesque, but isn’t Meera guilty as well? How far can one go to earn the patriarch’s love and approval? How much agency do the women in this family—and by extension all families—really have in their roles as wives, mothers and daughters? Repulsed at first by her husband’s secret, Meera decides to play along. She feels the need to be the perfect wife, the woman who will do anything to keep her husband happy. She also enlists her daughters in the mission to help their father. In their complicity lies safety, she reasons. Naina, who is closest to Meera, often parrots this rationale: what mother did, she did it to keep us safe. Sujata differs and manages to break free as an adult. But the sins of her father have made her too guarded. She is wary of relationships, wary of love.

The daughters’ conflicting views on their mother’s lifechanging decision is sensitively etched. Sujata blames her mother for robbing of them of their childhood and finds everything—the food Meera cooked, the recipes she shared, the holidays they spent in breezy coastal towns and laidback hill stations—all tainted.

The story unravels through two alternating perspectives: Naina’s first-person voice and Meera’s third-person reminiscences. Both voices give us an insider’s view of the family dynamics. Naina’s accounts of her childhood, her relationships with her siblings; her bond with her mother and her conflicted relationship with her father; all build a cohesive picture of the world they occupy. Meera’s flashbacks into the early years of her marriage are also a timeline of Ambarish’s deeds. There is a point at which she clearly sees the darkness enveloping her husband’s core. And then she thinks, “in all that was strange about this marriage, at least her girls were wonderful. She could find comfort in their sweet innocence.”

Meera’s backstory is sketchy. Naina remembers that her maternal grandmother died when she was five. She also shares that her mother’s brother moved away and that they stopped meeting her mother’s relatives after a point. Was it because Ambarish ordered them to? Was it isolation by design or did Meera’s family suspect what Ambarish was capable of?

When Meera discovers Mei Wan, the girl Ambarish had fallen in love with when he was a student in China, she writes to her. The correspondence between the two women goes on for years. Eventually, Mei Wan reveals some horrifying truths about Ambarish’s early years and her reasons for breaking up with him.

Mei Wan is one of the pivots on which the story rests. But she comes across as more of a convenient plot device than a fully rounded character. The resemblance between Mei Wan’s father and Ambarish seems like too much of a coincidence. What are the odds of Mei Wan meeting a man with the exact same appetite for the macabre as her father? Pretty slim! So, this is a tall ask on the readers’ capacity for willing suspension of disbelief.

Food is a recurring motif in the book. Plenty of homecooked meals are prepared and eaten. A dish isn’t just a dish: it is steeped in love and memory; revulsion and regret. One daughter may cherish a recipe; the other, banish it from her kitchen and her consciousness. Food locates the characters in a specific physical and emotional space. And it invokes a variety of sensations in readers. Some juxtapositions are startling, and hard to forget—such as Naina breathing in the smoke from her mother’s funeral pyre, while clinging to the memory of a Lohri celebration at their home, where potatoes wrapped in foil were roasting on the fire and the “smoke smelt delicious”.

The motifs in The Ex Daughters of Tolstoy House add heft to the narrative, sharpening the social critique it offers.

A word about the title. A book soaked in blood, leading us down the warped alleys of the human mind; a narrative that guns at the status quo, and is geared to smash convenient truths, could have done with a fiercer title. Something with a more menacing ring, perhaps?

Vineetha Mokkil is assistant editor, Outlook. She is the author of the book A Happy Place and Other Stories

This article is part of Outlook’s 1 June 2025 issue, 'Gated Neighbourhood', which examines the state of diplomacy, media, and democracy in the wake of the ceasefire. It appeared in print as 'Bloodied Pages.'