THEIR INHERITANCE OF LOSS

The twin violence of 1947 and 1984 forms the heart of this gripping new novel

How many women do we know, or have we heard of, who are named Draupadi? The name of the one epic female character in India’s greatest epic finds no takers, whereas Karan-Arjuna-Krishna sprout like weeds,” says Niki Nalwa, while talking to her grandmother about how successive retellings of the Mahabharata have cast Draupadi in the mould of a “vixen-wimp”.

Niki is born the day prime minister Durga’s Emergency is lifted. Just hours before though, the pressure of sterilisation targets have meant that no doctors are available at the hospital to tend to her mother, who dies shortly after giving birth. Niki is raised by three feminists—her dadima Zohra, her dad Jinder and the feisty Nooran, who was taken in as an orphan by her grandmother after her family was killed during Partition.

When Niki is just seven years old, the 1984 pogrom seizes the nation and in the battle of religious hatred, women’s suffering is pushed to the fringes. One among them is Jyot Kaur, who loses her husband and four kids. This is the second cataclysm in Jyot’s life, having lost her entire family during Partition. The Radiance of a Thousand Suns alternates between Niki’s and Jyot’s stories, followed over three decades. Sodheshwar deftly weaves in crucial events in the Mahabharata as the narrative progresses.

Jinder is working on a book around the stories of the survivors of the Partition sectarian riots, and the 1984 anti-Sikh riots. And at the heart of this twin violence is Jyot—but her story remains unknown. After Jinder’s death, Niki sets out to complete the book, but she must first trace down Jyot and get her to break her silence. Their paths cross in New York, but Jyot seems unrelenting. Sodheshwar ties up loose ends with a heartrending revelation.

In the acknowledgments, the author writes that independent India’s history has always been ‘his’ story. With this novel, she wanted to reconstruct it and add to it the absent stories of missing and suppressed women. And she does a fine job of it. Not to mention, at a time when the political landscape is shifting towards a singular narrative, it feels like very relevant reading. ■