A poignant and brave exploration of childhood’s less lovely spaces, this work is a sensitive, vividly-relived memoir that captures the innocence and confusion of a small girl struggling against the paradoxes that rock her life. Of a middle-class Parsi girl going to a Catholic school in a predominantly Hindu city; of a girl cozy in the overwhelming love of her extended family and yet a victim of the exacting demands of grown-up love; of a privileged, westernized, citified kid, a stranger in her own land, devastated by the guilt of growing up provided for in a country of abysmal poverty. With an unflinching gaze, Umrigar pulls each of her characters into and out of focus to reveal the definitive – at times profoundly intimate – events of their respective lives. A dazzling debut.
There are no reviews yet.