The Parted Earth
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
In August 1947, 16-year-old Deepa’s life in New Delhi begins to unravel in the days leading up to the birth of the Muslim minority nation of Pakistan, and the Hindu majority nation of India. Her secret Muslim boyfriend Amir, who sends her origami love notes, must now flee with his sister Layla and their parents to Lahore, Pakistan. Amir promises to return to Delhi to marry Deepa after the violence of Partition has ended. Soon after Amir’s departure, Deepa’s parents are killed. Her God-parents, fearful that Deepa is in grave danger, force her to move with them to London. Nine months later, Deepa gives birth to Vijay. She never sees or hears from Amir again.
After a devastating miscarriage in Atlanta in the present day, 40-year-old newly unemployed Shanthi (“Shan”) Johnson must confront her husband Max about his reckless spending. While grieving both her pregnancy loss and her marriage’s subsequent implosion, she finds clues that lead her to believe that the real reason her deceased father Vijay had abandoned her and her mother 30 years earlier to move to New Delhi was because he was in search of his father, a man he’d never known. To kickstart her life again, Shan moves out of her marital home, searches for a new job, and resumes her father’s search for her grandfather, whose name, she later learns, is Amir. To find Amir, Shan must first track down her estranged 86-year-old grandmother Deepa, a prickly woman who never wanted to have anything to do with Shan. During Shan's search, which eventually takes her to Amsterdam and New Delhi, she comes to realize that the origami love notes Amir once sent to Deepa may be the clue to their reunion.
Customer Reviews
Not bad for a first novel
The author is an Indian-Amercian attorney, journalist, community organiser and non-fiction writer (mainly politics and social justice). This is her first novel.
In brief
The setting is New Delhi in the months before partition of India and Pakistan. Deepa is a 16-year-old middle class Hindu girl, the daughter of a doctor and a midwife, God-daughter of another Anglo doctor. She has a secret Muslim boyfriend Amir with a passion for origami, who is forced to flee to Lahore with his family due to escalating anti-Muslim violence. Then someone blows up her Mum and Dad’s medical practice and she’s left an orphan. Her God-parents take her to London to keep her safe, and she drops a sprog she names Vijay 9 months later. Oops. Fast forward to present day Atlanta where 40-year-old Shanthi has just had a miscarriage and her marriage is breaking down due to her husband’s spendthrift ways when she uncovers clues as to why her now dead father Vijay abandoned the family 30 years earlier to travel to India and look for his own father. (You guessed it. Amir.) Yada, yada, Shanthi takes up the quest, which involves trips to Europe and India and tangling with an irascible 86-year-old Deepa.
Writing
Professional prose apart from dialogue that I found unconvincing. Others better qualified than me to comment have highlighted anachronistic and other errors that reflect a lack of basic understanding of how India works, or worked back in the day, presumably because the author has always lived in the US. Otherwise, this is a somewhat shallow (by the standards of Indian authors) intergenerational family saga, with themes including personal trauma, displacement, colonialism and political violence, the latter of which has relevance in present day Hindu nationalism a la Modi.
Bottom line
Not bad for a first novel, but doesn’t live up to the hype surrounding it IMHO.