Title
– The Tiger’s Share
Author
– Keshava Guha
Genre
– Contemporary Literature
Publisher
– Hachette India (2025)
ISBN
– 978-1399813389
Hardback
– 246 pages
Buy
– Amazon
“Well, let me tell you. We - we humans - have decided that we are apart from life. Above life. Nature, after all, has rules that we don't set. It has limits. It has its own law of Karma. Everything you do has its consequence, has its response. We used to know all this. We have forgotten.”
The Tiger’s Share is a quiet storm of a novel. The multilayered story is set in present-day Delhi. A family's private conflicts become a lens through which we observe social and political shifts in India.
The book opens with a jarring scene: a father resigns. Brahm Saxena, a retired accountant, calls a family meeting. He tells his children—Tara, a brilliant lawyer, and Rohit, a drifting son—that he is done. Done being a father. He wants to serve something larger now. The planet. The country. Maybe even the truth.
His personal choice ripples outward. It begins to mirror the novel’s core themes—ecological, political, and generational. One strange declaration turns into a story about the cost of ideals.
This is the central storyline of The Tiger’s Share. We witness it all through Tara’s perspective. She sees the city clearly. Smog in the sky. Garbage on the streets. Thick air and how sweetness of a city gone bad. Tara narrates it all with a sharp eye. She is ambitious and restless. She wants to believe in something. But doubt creeps in. Maybe she isn’t who her father hoped she’d be.
There is another pair of siblings: Kunal and Lila. Rich, well-known, always at war. Kunal, the adopted son, believes he is “the chosen one.” He wants control, especially of the family business. Lila, born into the family, resists. She calls him entitled. Their fight exposes something raw: how power hides in gender and class.
Guha writes with sly observation. His sentences don’t shout. They smoulder. “You can lose a house in an earthquake, you can lose any investment in a recession, but education, you can’t lose. I believe,” there are layers of insight.
His narration is elegant and witty. Every character feels made of bone and flesh—especially Brahm, a man shaped by loss and old ideals. He keeps a photograph of Bhagat Singh on his desk. Even in silence, he demands more of the world. His son Rohit, in contrast, turns angry, rants on YouTube.
In Guha’s novel, Delhi is not just a city—it’s a character, a breathing place. And it is falling apart. The trees, the air, the light—everything is fading. The city decays, and we watch. Guha renders this decline. And what it feels like to live in its slow collapse.
'Delhi,' my father continued, 'well, there is no better place to see this than Delhi. What was Delhi? A perfect oasis. In the middle of a near-desert, a slice of green heaven, fed by a strong river. What have we made of Delhi? A place unfit for life. The river is a dry garbage dump. The water in our pipes is liquid refuse. The air- I won't tell you about the air. Every park is a monument to what we have done. What is a park? A temple of life. Our parks are temples of sickness. Every tree, every bird suffering, as if it has been told it must live but is stuck in a place no longer fit for living. Come to the mandi and you won't be able to show me one tomato that isn't sick and decaying.'
A strange coincidence: Ranthambhore, the national park, is the crown of my hometown. And it appears in the book. I won’t spoil the plot, but remember: the park matters and it holds weight in the story. The Tiger’s Share is a book about what we owe to each other, to our country, to the future.
About the Author
KESHAVA GUHA was born in Delhi and raised in Bangalore. He studied history and politics at Harvard, and writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. He writes regularly on politics, literature and sport for a host of publications.
This post is powered by Blogchatter Review Program.
