Category: Fiction
Rights: All rights available
A single journal changes everything.
When sixteen-year-old Shanaya finds her mother’s pink journal during a school trek, she reads what was never meant for her. Inside are truths about her parents’ marriage that permanently alter how she understands love, power, and family.
Arti is a successful investment banker. Capable, admired, dependable. Married for nineteen years to Samar, a charismatic self-made businessman, she has built a life that looks secure from the outside. Inside their upper-class Indian home, intimacy has long disappeared. Samar’s alcoholism, entangled with unacknowledged impotence, sets off a familiar cycle. Shame numbed by drinking. Drinking followed by denial. Denial turning into blame. Over time, reality itself shifts, and Arti is positioned as the problem that must be managed.
Alcohol becomes both refuge and weapon. On some nights it softens Samar. On others it sharpens him. Apologies dissolve into forgetting, rage into silence, and the family learns to live inside repetition. Arti adapts as so many partners of addicts do, over-functioning, rationalizing, absorbing damage, until co-dependence feels indistinguishable from love.
Their son Shiv grows up reading moods and anticipating explosions. Ordinary decisions carry weight. Confusion becomes normal. Trust in one’s own instincts slowly erodes.
Told through intimate journaling and close observation, The Fault Lines Within explores how alcoholism fractures families in ways rarely spoken about in South Asian homes, where respectability and patriarchy often protect the addict and isolate the spouse. Through Shanaya’s discovery and Arti’s reckoning, the novel asks a quiet but necessary question. What happens when a woman stops trying to save a marriage and begins to save herself?
The author: Pragati Jalan Sureka