Clay & Ash

In the cramped, clay-dusted lanes of Kolkata's Kumartuli—where gods are born from river mud and sold before the monsoon—Savitri Pal has spent forty years shaping every goddess except the one her hands most want to make.

The best idol-maker in the neighborhood. The only woman to hold the tools. A widow of twenty-three years who has worked through every kind of grief except one: she has never sculpted a child's face. Not since her daughter Meena was born dead, held once, and returned to whatever place babies go before the world has a chance to name them.

When a prestigious Durga Puja commission forces her to sculpt ten children from ten different communities of Kolkata, Savitri's hands betray her in the most devastating and luminous way possible. And what emerges from the clay is not just a daughter she lost—but a theology of grief she had been building without knowing it, one goddess at a time.

Clay and Ash is a story about the Ishtadevata—the personal god, the chosen face of the divine—and how devotion can be so deep, so embodied, so reciprocal that it rewrites what we thought we knew about loss, memory, and what the hands remember when the mind has given up.

For readers of Arundhati Roy, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and Kamila Shamsie. For anyone who has ever made something with their hands and felt the making make them back.