My friend wrote a book!
Actually, she’s written a few books now, but this is the very first book she ever wrote that got published! It took me a while to get around to it because I had read enough of the description to know the event that kicks off the action of the book is the main character’s mom dying. The book came out four days before my mom died, so I knew I would need some time before I’d be able to read this.
I was finally ready this summer, and this book is so good! I swear I’m not just saying that because I was friends with Madhuri Vijay in college.
The main character, Shalini, is the privileged only child of a somewhat traditional couple in Bangalore. I say “somewhat traditional” because, while her dad works and her mom stays home, her mom is not the stereotypical docile housewife. She’s loud and abrasive and has a tendency to piss off just about everyone. She loves haggling for goods and produce until the vendors give her what she wants just to get rid of her. She doesn’t seem to have any friends because she doesn’t respect any of her peers. Come to think of it, it doesn’t seem like she respects anyone.
That changes when Shalini is a young child and a man, Bashir Ahmed, comes knocking on their door to sell clothing. Something about him attracts Shalini’s mom to him and she invites him inside to do his thing. She ends up buying a shirt for Shalini, which Shalini wears once to try on and show off, and never wears again.
He keeps coming back every few months, and Shalini’s mom never buys anything else from him, but he seems to know instinctively how to entertain her, so entertain her he does. He tells her stories of his family and his home town, which turns out to be a remote Himalayan village in the troubled northern region of Kashmir.
Growing up in a comfortable home in Bangalore, Shalini is sheltered and only hears the occasional reference to the unrest in Kashmir.
Shalini’s mom dies while Shalini is away at college, and it takes most of the book to reveal how she died.
A few years after graduating from college, Shalini is living with her dad and working a job her dad got for her, but that she gives zero shits about.
When she gets fired, instead of telling her dad she got fired, she says she’s going to Kashmir for work.
Really she’s going to Kashmir because she remembers a story Bashir Ahmed told her of the town his wife’s family is from. She does some research to find the town, buys a train ticket, and heads off without anything resembling a plan.
Through sheer luck, Shalini manages to find a nice couple who are tapped into a network that helps people find loved ones who went missing. The couple’s own son disappeared several years ago when he was coming home from school. The cops pulled over and told him to get in the van, he got in the van and was never seen again. His mom is still holding out hope that he’s alive somewhere, but she seems to be the only one clinging to that belief.
They get word that Bashir is dead, but his son turns up and agrees to take Shalini to his village to stay at his place (which was also his father’s place) for an indeterminate amount of time.
Shalini is greeted by Bashir’s widow, daughter-in-law, and grandson, who eventually warms up to her. She starts to make a life for herself there, but staying becomes impossible when she realizes the truth of Bashir’s disappearance.
I think anyone who knows anything about the tension between India and Kashmir can see what’s coming, but the book does a great job of slowly introducing elements of that tension to make Shalini seem like a frog in a pot of water that’s slowly coming to a boil.
She sees soldiers. She hears stories of violence, but she hears conflicting accounts of the same incidents. A soldier who flirts with her when she’s alone treats her very differently when she’s with a Muslim woman.
Of course Shalini’s naïveté and desire to help lead her to make things worse so she has to leave and finally return home to her father who, by this point, has practically arranged a military escort to bring her home.
Even I didn’t see one of the twists at the end of the book coming, though in hindsight I suppose I should have.
This book is so good and I would recommend it even if I had never met the author.