After Karna's Wheel
The Henna Artist by Alka Joshi
If Karna's Wheel hooked you with its refusal to soften colonialism's legacy, The Henna Artist delivers the same raw honesty—post-independence India's calcified class systems, women clawing out agency, and mythological symbolism that cuts deep. No tidy endings, no orientalist tourism, just Jaipur's dust and unresolved family wounds that demand you sit with inheritance's true cost.