What happens when the head of a powerful Delhi family suddenly decides his wealth may not belong to his children after all? At the session 'The Tiger in the Room' at the Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters, author Keshava Guha turned a story about inheritance into a wider outlook on patriarchy, and the moral unease of India’s elites.

The discussion, moderated by S Nagesh, centred on Guha’s latest novel, 'The Tiger’s Share', but quickly expanded into questions that felt larger than fiction like who deserves wealth and how power shifts inside families, and how history quietly reshapes personal lives.

"When you write about people in a specific time and place, history presses in on them," Guha said, explaining how social tensions naturally seeped into the story. "I don’t begin with big themes they emerge from the characters and their lives."

At the heart of the novel is a wealthy Delhi patriarch whose unexpected moral and ecological awakening disrupts the future. That shockwave is observed through Tara Saxena -- an intelligent, self aware daughter navigating love, loyalty, and gendered expectations. Guha noted that he wanted to portray "a kind of Indian woman not often written about", shaped by ideas and intellectual life as much as by family duty.

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A key moment in the session came when Guha addressed why his fiction focuses on the upper class. Rejecting the notion that literature must only represent the marginalised. He argued, "Understanding how elites think and change also has social value." The choices of the powerful, he suggested, ripple outward, affecting countless unseen lives.

The novel’s central metaphor, the shift from the familiar "lion’s share" to the more unsecure "tiger’s share" also drew attention. Guha linked it to post liberalisation in India, where the end of easy living and the rise of constant hustling is existing. The change, he said, has altered family structures, class anxiety, and gender roles, making inheritance not just a legal matter but a moral and emotional battlefield.

Language and craft were also part of the conversation. Nagesh praised Guha’s wit and finely tuned metaphors, comparing his style to the comedy of manners tradition. Guha agreed that the joy of language is essential to him, describing himself as a writer deeply formed by literature, poetry, and global fiction.

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When asked about regional readership, particularly the Malayalam translation of The Tiger’s Share, Guha reflected that Delhi may feel distant to Kerala readers, "almost like another country", yet the political and social decisions made there inevitably shape lives elsewhere, making the novel’s concerns widely resonant.

The session closed on the note of the book’s dramatic and unexpected ending, that leaves families, nation face the uncomfortable question of what they truly owe in the future. Through sharp social observation and psychological depth, 'The Tiger’s Share' emerged not just as a family drama, but as a portrait of contemporary India at a moral crossroads.