“Extinction” by Leeya Mehta
A small silver box lies buried in a garden in Rajkot. When a dachshund named Chotu digs it up, Ava recognises the object from a childhood she would rather leave undisturbed. She hides it again, but the box carries more than family memories. It is connected to a spirit tiger, an enchanted world beyond a mirror, and a past whose secrets continue to trouble the present. In Leeya Mehta’s Extinction, an ordinary family heirloom opens onto a world where the boundaries between memory and imagination, protection and captivity, are never entirely secure. What begins as a Gothic mystery gradually becomes a story about three generations of women and the suffering that families conceal, inherit, and sometimes struggle to overcome.
The novel’s mystery reaches back to 1952, when Ava encounters Mohan, a white tiger kept in captivity in Rewa, Central India. His mother and siblings have been killed, and the surviving animal has become an attraction for human spectators. Ava, then a young woman expecting a child, feels an extraordinary affinity with him. The tiger’s confinement and her own attraction to his presence establish a connection that will acquire greater significance as the story unfolds. Nearly six decades later, Ava’s granddaughter Leila returns to the same landscape with Raj and her young daughter, Meg. The return to Rewa brings the novel’s different generations into conversation, suggesting that places, objects and memories can preserve connections that time alone cannot dissolve.
At the centre of this history are Ava, her daughter Roxanne and her granddaughter Leila. Their lives are linked not simply by kinship but by experiences that have never been fully confronted. Mehta gradually reveals a family in which affection coexists with anxiety and the desire to preserve domestic peace can discourage uncomfortable questions. The novel’s central mystery is therefore larger than the secret of the silver box. What has happened within this family, and how have its consequences travelled from one generation to the next?
Mehta answers these questions through a combination of psychological realism and fantasy. In one episode set in Rajkot in February 1958, Ava supervises the painting of her company house. The domestic scene seems unremarkable until the painter’s disturbing familiarity with her young daughter makes her uneasy. Soon afterwards, Chotu discovers the silver box in the garden. Ava retrieves it and conceals it inside her dressing table, restoring the object to a place where it can remain out of sight. The sequence is effective because its mystery emerges from everyday life. A garden, a household servant, a family heirloom, and a mother’s concern for her child become charged with unease. The familiar home, supposedly a place of security, begins to look less reassuring.
The silver box gives this unease a supernatural dimension. Associated with Ava’s traumatic childhood, it provides access to an enchanted landscape inhabited by the spirit tiger. The mirror of her dressing table becomes a passage into a world beyond ordinary experience, offering companionship and refuge. Yet the refuge is not a simple escape. The past continues to exert its influence, and the box’s repeated concealment suggests how difficult it is to separate painful memories from the life built around them. Mehta’s fantasy is most persuasive when it makes an emotional truth visible: what people try to hide may continue to shape their choices even when they no longer speak about it.
The novel’s Gothic elements also make its domestic world unsettling. Beneath the routines of marriage, childcare, and household management lie fears that cannot be resolved through appearances alone. Ava’s marriage to Cyrus offers material comfort, but his authority over the family’s daily life suggests the restrictions that can accompany respectability. The novel does not present the household as uniformly oppressive; rather, it reveals how security and control may become difficult to distinguish. Its supernatural events deepen this uncertainty, although the shifting perspectives and elaborate symbolism sometimes make the connections between fantasy and psychological experience less clear than they might be.
The consequences of family silence become especially painful through Leila’s experience of childhood abuse. Her struggle to speak about what happened exposes the difficulty of turning private suffering into something that others can recognise. Disclosure may bring the possibility of understanding, but it also risks misunderstanding and disappointment. Mehta refuses to make confession a convenient turning point after which everything improves. Leila’s relationships reveal that affection does not guarantee empathy: people may care for someone and still struggle to understand the depth of that person’s pain. The novel’s interest lies in the difficult work that follows the telling, when silence has been broken but its effects remain.
Leila’s relationship with her daughter, Meg, adds another complication. Wanting to protect a child is natural, but Leila’s fears are shaped by experiences that make the world appear threatening. Her determination to prevent harm risks allowing the past to dictate the future. Mehta thus asks whether protection can become another form of confinement when fear governs every decision. The question resonates with the tiger’s story, although the comparison is not exact: human trauma and animal captivity are distinct experiences. What links them is the broader concern with the limits of control and the difficulty of allowing another being to live beyond the boundaries one has established.
The family’s Parsi background gives the novel a particular cultural texture. Inherited furniture, household practices, religious references, and family loyalties connect the characters to a history larger than their individual lives. Such details make the family feel rooted in a specific social world. They also raise questions about what families preserve. Traditions and objects can sustain a sense of belonging, but loyalty may become burdensome when keeping the family intact requires difficult experiences to remain unspoken. Mehta’s treatment of inheritance is therefore both material and emotional: what passes between generations includes not only possessions and customs but also the fears that shape how family members understand one another.
This concern with possession extends to the natural world. Ava reflects on her teak dressing table, an heirloom passed down through generations of women. She imagines the tree being felled, processed, and transformed into furniture, and compares this process with the confinement of wild animals for human pleasure. The polished object carries a history of extraction that its domestic setting conceals. The tiger, too, has been removed from its natural environment and made available for human fascination. Through these parallel images, Mehta questions the assumption that beauty or affection gives people the right to possess what they admire. The ecological dimension enriches the family narrative by showing that the desire to control is not confined to intimate relationships.
In the epilogue the story returns to Rewa in 2009. Leila, Raj and Meg visit the grounds where the Maharaja’s white tiger once lived. The abandoned viewing gallery has become overgrown, while a tiger appears across the lake with three cubs. The sight offers an image of life continuing beyond a history of capture and loss. Later, Leila walks with her own white tiger and urges him to go free. She imagines that a park ranger might one day encounter a white tiger cub and regard it as a miracle. The moment is moving because Leila’s final gesture is not an attempt to keep the animal close, but a willingness to let him go. The landscape once associated with captivity becomes a place where freedom can at least be imagined.
Extinction is an ambitious novel, bringing together family secrets, Gothic fantasy, psychological suffering, and environmental questions. Its symbolism occasionally becomes so elaborate that the relationship between its different narrative strands is difficult to follow. Yet its most memorable images—the silver box hidden inside the dressing table, the tree transformed into furniture, and the tiger urged towards freedom—give its concerns a striking physical presence. Mehta’s achievement lies in connecting the private history of a family to broader questions about memory, power, and the right to live beyond the past.
The title suggests several kinds of disappearance: the loss of a species, the concealment of a family’s history, and the possibility that a pattern of suffering might finally end. The novel offers no guarantee that the past can be repaired or that acknowledgement will bring reconciliation. Instead, it asks whether recognising what has happened can prevent its consequences from governing the next generation. Like the tiger moving towards an uncertain freedom, the characters must face a future they cannot completely control. In Mehta’s world, survival is not simply a matter of enduring what has been inherited. It is the difficult work of deciding what must no longer be passed on.
