In Exile
Rupture, Reunion, and My Grandmother’s Secret Life
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Globe 100 Best Book of 2024!
The Hill Times 100 Best Book of 2024
In a deeply personal investigation, award-winning journalist Sadiya Ansari takes us across three continents and back a century as she seeks the truth behind a family secret. Why did her grandmother Tahira abandon her seven children to follow a man from Karachi to a tiny village in Punjab? And though she eventually left him, Tahira remained estranged from her children for nearly two decades. Who was she in those years when she was no longer a wife or mother? For Sadiya herself, uninterested in marriage and children, the question begets another: What space is available to women who defy cultural expectations?
Through her inquiry, Sadiya discovers what her daadi's life was like during that separation and she confronts difficult historical truths: the pervasiveness of child marriage, how Partition made refugees of millions of families like hers, and how the national freedoms achieved in 1947 did not extend to women’s lives. She sees the threads of this history woven through each generation after, and finds an unexpected sense of belonging in a culture that, at first blush, shuns women for wanting lives of their own.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A seasoned journalist delves into her family’s mysterious, heart-rending history in this powerful memoir. Sadiya Ansari never really knew her grandmother Tahira. But when she finds out that the pious and traditional woman once abandoned her seven children—Ansari’s father included—for another man after a harrowing move from India to Pakistan during the 1947 partition, Ansari is inspired to dig into her grandmother’s past to uncover truths about her family’s present. Filled with stunning descriptions of Karachi, Lahore, and the journeys in between, Tahira’s story is colored by revelations of truly heartbreaking traumas (like being married off to her uncle at just 14) that rippled through the lives of her children. In Exile highlights the compelling and sometimes contradictory lengths women will go to for personal freedom, especially when their voices are silenced.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this triumphant debut, journalist Ansari investigates a family mystery involving her grandmother. Growing up in a large Pakistani family in Toronto, Ansari had a complex relationship with her paternal grandmother, Tahira, who showed little interest in Ansari despite sharing a bedroom with her for years. The only bedtime story Tahira ever told Ansari involved a couple burdened with seven children, whose hopes for a son were never realized. The tale took on new significance when Ansari learned from an aunt that Tahira once left behind a husband and seven children for a new romance. Ten years after Tahira's death, Ansari began asking her father and other family members and friends about her grandmother's past, supplementing her interviews with research about the 1947 partition of India, which Tahira lived through. Ansari learned that, after being widowed in her early 30s, the fiercely religious Tahira pursued a second marriage that eventually fell apart. Ansari paces the account of her investigation like a crime novel, alternating first-person sections with reconstructions of Tahira's life in India and Pakistan, and drawing powerful parallels between Tahira's struggles and her own trepidations about marriage and motherhood. The result is insightful, surprising, and beautifully written.
