Mumbai, March 23 -- If a women's courtyard is considered an enclosed inner space, this book is a canvas with streaks and splashes of unexpectedly vibrant colour and design. The women that inhabit the courtyard are strong, and the qualities that each epitomizes is perceived through her actions and speech. So while we never learn the given names of Amma (also known as 'Mazhar's Bride') and Aunty, we experience them as real people. This is a historical period and a segment of society where poets sing on the streets - but also where arrogance is native to wealth and privilege. Amma has been betrayed by her circumstances, and her constant taunts and never-ending self-pity are received with tolerance because life has been cruel to someone who expected better. Her sister-in-law Najma, an MA in English and a working woman who in the 1940s arranges her own marriage (and later walks out of it), is vain and consistently demeaning of those she considers beneath her because they have not studied English. Najma's sister-in-law, Aunty, on the other hand, is that loving woman on whom every large household relies. Even when immersed in disappointment, loss and financial struggle, she labours on, emanating kindness. Young Chammi - acknowledged as Shamima but once by the author - has the status of one whose mother died and whose father left to live elsewhere, his new life overrun by new wives and their offspring. Beautiful, unwanted Chammi, treated with love by Aunty, somehow became that wild, shrewish girl whose tantrums are feared to such an extent that when her marriage is arranged, no one dares to inform her. Kareeman Bua, who came with her mother in the mistress's dowry, lives a life of domestic servitude, devoted to the family, oblivious to scars formed by disproportionate rage on her body....