India, Oct. 4 -- In this intimate yet simultaneously anthropological exploration of the life of her maternal grandmother Pankajam (1911-2007), Kalpana Karunakaran captures the essence of an exceptional woman, even as it situates that woman in a social universe shaped by the conventions of Tamil Brahmin orthodoxy. Karunakaran conveys with clarity how the "utterly ordinary" life of a "woman of no consequence" (as Pankajam writes of herself), lived out largely within the confines of family, was quite far from ordinary. The book draws on letters, glimpses of Pankajam's life as narrated in her semi-autobiographical short stories, and her autobiography, which she wrote, on and off, between 1949 and 1995. What emerges is a riveting portrait of women forcing home and nation to reckon with their stubborn striving for self-actualisation....