Family and sisterhood propel universal story of ‘Shergill’ journey
Sita Kaur Shergill lies dying in a London hospital, where she writes a farewell letter to her daughters. Sita makes what seems a simple request of her daughters: To make a spiritual quest to the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India, in her honor.
And so begins “The Unlikely Adventures of the Shergill Sisters” (William Morrow, 310 pp., ★★★☆) by Balli Kaur Jaswal, her follow-up to 2017’s “Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows.” It’s a playful yet profound novel that is as much earnest as escapist.
Like any mother, Sita, who was born in India, worries about what will become of her Londonbred Punjabi daughters once she leaves this earth. Specifically, she is worried about what will become of their relationships with each other. If there is one incontrovertible fact, it is that the Shergill sisters have very little in common.
What they do share is an unfailing ability to assume they are alone in their worries and that their sisters are exempt from them. After all, don’t all siblings compare themselves? And the result is the truism that comparison is the thief of joy. Judging by the sisters’ current lives, joy is sorely needed.
Rajni, a school principal, is the eldest of Sita’s daughters. She and her husband Kabir are preoccupied with troubles at home revolving around their son Anil and his recent life choices. Rajni is 11 years older than her sister Jezmeen and 14 years older than Shirnia, the baby of the family. Her relationship with both younger sisters is more maternal than sororal. And unlike Jezmeen and Shirnia, this won’t be Rajni’s first trip to India. That happened when she was a teenager, and the event remains shrouded in secrecy.
Jezmeen is a frustrated and struggling actress, whose recent firing from a TV hosting job is taking a back burner to managing the potential fallout from a viral YouTube video she unwittingly starred in. Shirnia lives in Australia; her geographical distance and brief visits home allow her to shield herself from any judgment from her family about her seemingly picture-perfect, modernly “retro” arranged marriage to husband Sehaj.
Even though each sister’s individual struggles have them feeling exposed, together they face an even greater vulnerability once they embark as three independent women traveling in modernday India. The individual journeys, told through flashbacks, not only force them to face their pasts as daughters and sisters but also their present as women.
The melancholy surrounding them at the beginning of their quest and the pragmatic approach the sisters take to the trip is not all that inspiring at first. But that changes soon enough. Jaswal ably weaves a stirring tale of family, self-identity and acceptance that draws the reader in. The story flows, moving easily from heartfelt to humorous without feeling forced
There is a realness to the story. Particularly Jaswal’s characters. They are not some romanticized versions of people we often find in fiction. We see ourselves in them, warts and all, and, as a result, the reader becomes fully invested in them, both as individuals and as a family. What may seem to be a singular story about first-generation, Londonbred Punjabi women evolves into a story universal to us all.