LADIES COUPE by Anita Nair

Meet Akhilandeswari, Akhila for short: forty-five and single,               an income-tax clerk, and a woman who has never been allowed to live her own life---always the daughter, the sister, the aunt, the provider. Until the day she gets herself a one-way ticket to the seaside town of Kanyakumari, gloriously alone for the first time in her life and determined to break free of all that her conservative Tamil Brahmin life has bound her to.

In the in time atmosphere of the ladies coupe which she shares with five other women, Akhila  get to know her fellow travellers  Janaki,  pampered wife  and confused mother; Margaret shanty, a chemistry teacher married to the poetry of element and an insensitive tyrant too self-absorbed to recognize her need; Prabha  Devi, the perfect daughter and wife transformed for life by a glimpse of a swimming pool; fourteen-year-old Sheela , with her ability to perceive what others cannot; and maikolanthu, whose innocence was destroy by one night of lust.