Lessons in Forgetting

by Nair, Anita

When we first see Meera, she is a carefully groomed corporate wife with a successful career as a writer of cookbooks. Then one day her husband fails to come home after a party and she becomes responsible not just for her children but her mother and grandmother, and the running of Lilac House, their rambling old family home in Bangalore. Enter Professor J.A. Krishnamurthy, or JAK, a renowned cyclone studies expert, on a very different trajectory in life. In a bedroom in his house lies his nineteen-year old daughter Smriti, left comatose after a vicious attack on her while she was on holiday at a beachside town. A wall of silence and fear surrounds the incident— the grieving father is helped neither by the local police, nor by her boyfriend in his search for The truth. Through a series of coincidences, Meera and JAK find their lives turning and twisting together, with the unpredictability and sheer inevitability of a cyclone. And as the days pass, fresh beginnings appear where there seemed to be only endings.

329 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2010

Reviews

[Siddharth Shankaran · Rating 3 out of 5]

A readable book which surprisingly had a good middle section while the start and end were merely platitudinous. The narration is swift, and brilliantly segues into multiple streams of thought that the characters in the book think aloud.
Notwithstanding the fervent plea of author to put forward the case of her protagonist Meera, the story doesn't have its meat in her, or rather I must say that the bearers of the story are the characters around her, while Meera to the very end remains what she was to start with, a naive woman.
However the display of emotions, especially woman's , in the novel seems both powerful and empathetic . If this book is to be read for anything , it is this careful kneading and dredging of feelings of South Indian women in her several avatars.
Read it if you must, not a bad book. But don't be shy of receiving tropes especially in the very beginning .

[Aranya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Lessons in Forgetting feels like walking through the quiet ruins of ordinary lives — lives that look stable from the outside but are slowly collapsing within. Anita Nair does not write grief loudly; she lets it settle into kitchens, silences, marriages, and memories. That is what makes this novel ache so deeply.

Meera’s life unravels after abandonment, but the novel is not merely about betrayal. It is about the terrifying process of rediscovering yourself after years of becoming invisible inside relationships. Parallelly, Professor J.A. Krishnamurthy’s grief carries a different loneliness — the helplessness of surviving memories that refuse to soften. Their stories move like two wounded rivers meeting quietly.

What stayed with me most was how tenderly the book understands emotional exhaustion. Every character seems to carry unfinished sorrow, hidden shame, or the weight of expectations they never chose. Yet the novel never becomes hopeless. Somewhere between pain and recovery, it gently reminds us that healing is not dramatic. Sometimes, it is simply learning how to breathe differently after loss.