Your novelĀ has a lot going for it: a wonderfully rendered rich tapestry of a setting most readers will find fascinating, a dysfunctional but loving family with conflicting aspirations at the center of which is a young man who keeps sacrificing his happiness to fulfill what he sees as his family responsibilities.
You have a marvelous eye for detail and sense of place. These gifts enable you to recreate India so vividly that your readers will live there for the length of the novel, immersed in the scene except for a brief side trip to Russia. You also recreate Indian culture beautifully, its standards, mores, limitations.
We come to know the family well enough that we feel weāre a part of it, following its members over a period of nearly twenty years. Thereās a sense of authenticity in your depiction of family life that makes its members and what happens in their daily life real to the reader.
But for all these virtues, there are ways youāve handled your story and the characters who enact it that make it hard for readers to be as involved as you want them to be. Or, to put it another way, you tell the story in a way that at times makes it too easy for the reader to drop out of the novel.
Ā All stories need narrative summaryāa novel consisting of nonstop scenes would lack texture, offer no setting, and be exhausting to read. But you seriously overuse summary in this manuscript.Ā Narrative summary fills the reader in, tells rather than shows. Scenes involve your readers, putting them in the story, making them part of events as theyāre happening. Readers donāt want information, they crave experiences. They need dialogueāthey need to hear your characters talk. In proportion to the length of the novel, thereās very little dialogue. And very few scenesāagain, considering the length of the novel.
And itās in scenes rather than narrative summary that conflict is made real for the reader–and conflict is something this story needs a great deal more of, because itās what drives fiction, what keeps readers reading. When conflict does arise, you seldom give us an all-stops-out immediate scene. More often thereās a scrap of a scene, or the conflict takes place offstage. (For example, we never see Ishab beating Kash, and when they fight verbally we only hear scraps of the conversation.)Ā