Partitions
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- £4.99
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- £4.99
Publisher Description
As India is rent overnight into two nations, sectarian violence explodes on both sides of the new border, with tidal waves of refugees fleeing the blood and chaos. Fighting to board the last train to Delhi, Shankar and Keshav, six-year-old Hindu twins, lose sight of their mother and plunge into the whirling human mass to find her. A young Sikh woman, Simran Kaur, flees her father, who would rather poison his daughter than see her defiled. And Ibrahim Masud, an elderly Muslim doctor driven from the town of his birth, limps towards the new Muslim state of Pakistan.
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Poet Majmudar's unconvincing debut novel portrays the partition of India through the lives of two young brothers, a Muslim doctor, and a young, religious Sikh girl whose father tries to poison her rather than let her fall prey to marauders. The narration courtesy of the dead father of the two boys offers ample opportunity for remarks about being dead, and as it charts the lives of the characters, Majmudar makes heavy use of both the concept of partition and the word itself as the boys are separated from their mother in a mobbed train station, the doctor makes his slow way to Pakistan, and the girl sets out alone armed only with kitchen knives. Tedious though not clumsy, the book subjects its characters to public defecation, sex slave traffickers, and to witness suicide, but even the dark ending can't shake the notion that the whole endeavor feels like a semisanitized and oversensationalized theme park ride.
