Partitions
A Novel
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A stunning first novel, set during the violent 1947 partition of India, about uprooted children and their journeys to safety
As India is rent into two nations, communal violence breaks out on both sides of the new border and streaming hordes of refugees flee from blood and chaos.
At an overrun train station, Shankar and Keshav, twin Hindu boys, lose sight of their mother and join the human mass to go in search of her. A young Sikh girl, Simran Kaur, has run away from 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 toward the new Muslim state of Pakistan, rediscovering on the way his role as a healer. As the displaced face a variety of horrors, this unlikely quartet comes together, defying every rule of self-preservation to forge a future of hope.
A dramatic, luminous story of families and nations broken and formed, Partitions introduces an extraordinary novelist who writes with the force and lyricism of poetry.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
