Age of Mondays: A Child’s Gaze on a Fractured World

Lopa Ghosh’s Age of Mondays introduces readers to Narois, a 10-year-old whose childhood is steeped in shadows. Her mother disappears every Monday to “a cold, cruel place,” her parents quarrel for no reason that she can comprehend, her best friend drifts away, and her teacher shows no tolerance for imagination. It is a world where stability is fragile and solace elusive.

At one point, the narrative invokes Sylvia Plath and Marjane Satrapy, drawing on the intensity and fragility of Narois’ intellectual Bengali mother’s poetic vision. For adult readers, with a yen for literature these references make the novel resonate. However, these allusions may well sail over the heads of younger readers. For a child or teenager encountering the story, Plath or even Oblonsky are unlikely to stir recognition in those who may not have such enlightened education at home. Instead, these passages might be absorbed more as atmosphere than reference — a mood of darkness, creativity and unease that hovers over Narois’s world.

This tension between accessibility and ambition runs through the novel. Ghosh does not simplify her language to suit a younger readership; she is confident that readers will either grasp or feel their way through the imagery, even if they miss some of the details. For some, this will enrich the experience, offering a book that can be read at different depths depending on the age and knowledge of the reader. For others, it may result in a degree of alienation, where the density of metaphor and literary allusion creates distance.

Of course, this may be part of the book’s intention: to suggest that childhood, is overcast by the shadows of adult knowledge. Narois’s sadness, her metaphors of bicycles, fireflies, and earthquakes, capture that very ambiguity — the sense of feeling the world’s weight without fully comprehending its meaning. Balanced by the weight of the Delhi weather and the feeling of an unsafe city, which cast their own shadows.

Her observations are startlingly vivid. “Sadness is not a bicycle that you learn to ride... it is a smell, a colour, a person,” she notes. Fights sound like “the low hum of a helicopter” swelling into “a mini-earthquake,” and even illness becomes a metaphor that glimmers ominously: “like fireflies, cancer stories gleamed and glowed.”

Her search for finding answers leads her into Delhi’s Jahanpanah Forest, a space that transforms into something almost mythic. There she meets the Jahanpanah Jugnus, led by the enigmatic Silver Samir, who tell stories of their lost lives and work to solve weather crises – linking them at one level to Mamma-mon.

The trope of the wood is a well-worn one in folk literature — in Ghosh’s novel, it acts as a narrative crucible. It inspires words which carry the power to make sense of history, personal and collective. Through candy coloured horror stories, Narois comes to reckon with abandonment, fractured family ties, and even the spectres of larger violence, from the Gujarat riots to the Holocaust and the Iranian Revolution.

If there is a caveat, it lies in Ghosh’s prose: metaphor-laden, sometimes tipping into adult sophistication that jars with the child’s voice that though often striking, slips into unmistakably adult phrasing, creating a dissonance between the character’s age and her reflections. The prose, packed with metaphor, synaesthesia, and elaborate imagery, can feel dense, slowing the narrative’s emotional momentum. The reader is asked to linger over Narois’ impressions, occasionally at the cost of plot progression.

Still, there is much that resonates. Ghosh has a sharp eye for detail and a gift for unsettling imagery. Her descriptions of domestic discord and childhood loneliness are vivid enough to stir discomfort, while the forest passages balance that darkness with moments of wonder and reconciliation.

Age of Mondays is not easy to read but it forces the reader to reckon with the fragility of innocence in an age of disruption, while also recognising the resilience children can call up in the face of loss. Crammed with invention and literary play, the book creates the impression: that today’s children are inheriting a world both damaged and daunting, and yet they continue to find ways of surviving within it. Ghosh situates Age of Mondays within literary and historic tradition, while making it distinctly her own.