The Crow Eaters
SynopsisPlot
At the dawn of the twentieth century in Pakistan, Freddy Junglewalla moves his family — pregnant wife, baby daughter, and Jerbanoo, his rotund mother-in-law — from their ancestral forest home to cosmopolitan Lahore. He opens a store, and as his fortunes grow, so does the animosity between Freddy and his mother-in-law. While Freddy prospers under British rule, life with the domineering Jerbanoo is another matter entirely.
Story
About this book
Set in early twentieth-century Lahore, The Crow Eaters follows Freddy Junglewalla, a Parsee man who moves his young family from a rural forest home to the city. With him come his pregnant wife, their baby daughter, and Jerbanoo, his large and forceful mother-in-law. Freddy opens a shop and begins building a commercial life under British colonial rule as his fortunes rise.
Much of the novel's energy comes from the friction between Freddy and Jerbanoo, whose clashing temperaments shape household life as persistently as any outside pressure. Bapsi Sidhwa uses this domestic conflict as a lens onto the Parsee community, a small Zoroastrian minority with roots in Persia that settled across South Asia over centuries. Comedy sits alongside a portrait of how a close-knit minority keeps its customs while adapting to urban life.
Sidhwa was born in Lahore and grew up within the Parsee community, and that background shows in the novel's attention to household routine, trade, and the rhythms of family speech. Lahore, on the Ravi River in what is now Pakistan, was a long-established commercial city, and the Parsee families who settled there were part of a much wider spread of small merchant communities across the subcontinent.
