Sakina's Kiss
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A taut story of hidden violence and self-deception from “an Indian Chekhov” (Suketu Mehta)
An upper-middle class couple in Bangalore, Venkat and Viji, find their quiet life upended—and the flaws in their marriage exposed—when two strange young men come knocking at their door in the middle of the night, claiming to have business with their daughter, Rekha, a college senior who happens to be visiting relatives in the countryside. Venkat—a narrator whose account of his marriage, and of the lives of his wife and daughter, we soon learn to doubt—sends the boys away, but they come back the next day, and now they’re not alone.
While Venkat begins to fear for his daughter’s safety, he is haunted by the memory of a betrayal and disappearance from long ago. As his guilt-ridden imagination leaps between knowing and unknowing, evasion and confrontation, Shanbhag reveals not just the tensions in a marriage or a family, but also the polarization of Indian politics and the resurgence of the Hindu right.
Precise, enigmatic, and suspenseful, Sakina’s Kiss fulfills the promise of Vivek Shanbhag's lauded debut, Ghachar Ghochar, which Parul Seghal called “A great Indian novel . . . elegant, lean, balletic” (The New York Times).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Shanbhag (Ghachar Ghochar) zeroes in on the growing cracks in an Indian family's facade in this rich and stimulating novel. The comfortable life of Venkat and his wife, Viji, in Bengaluru is disrupted when two young men knock on their door, asking for the whereabouts of the couple's daughter, Rekha, who is away from college at the family's orchard in the country. What at first seems like a romantic quarrel soon reveals itself to be much more complicated when Rekha doesn't return home. Venkat and Viji board a bus and head to the orchard, where they visit Suresh, a neighbor who was the last to see Rekha at the bus stand and who runs an activist magazine. Alongside the present-day plot, Shanbhag delves into Venkat's past, including the disappearance of his uncle Ramana when he was young. The past and present join to create a fascinating and intricate portrait of Venkat, which in turn encompasses the contentious political, gender, and class dynamics of contemporary India. Throughout, Shanbhag is a master of restraint, spinning a deceptively simple story that culminates in an exquisite final act. This one's a knockout.
