Nirmala

Married off to a widower twice her age because her father cannot arrange a match with a man closer to her own years, young Nirmala enters a household thick with suspicion, jealousy, and the corrosive weight of an old man's insecurity about his new bride. When her stepson begins to look at her with more than filial affection, the misunderstanding that follows destroys a family from the inside. Premchand's unsparing novel of child marriage and social hypocrisy remains one of the most powerful indictments of the dowry system and the fate of women in traditional Indian society ever written.