آنچه بدن به یاد می‌آورد

Introducing an eloquent, sensual new Canadian voice that rings out in a first novel that is exquisitely rich and stunningly original. Roop is a sixteen-year-old village girl in the Punjab region of undivided India in 1937 whose family is respectable but poor — her father is deep in debt and her mother is dead. Innocent and lovely, yet afraid she may not marry well, she is elated when she learns she is to become the second wife of a wealthy Sikh landowner, Sardarji, whose first wife, Satya, has failed to bear him any children. Roop trusts that the strong-willed Satya will treat her as a sister, but their relationship becomes far more ominous and complicated than expected. Roop's tale draws the reader immediately into her world, making the exotic familiar and the family's story startlingly universal, but What the Body Remembers is also very much Satya's story. She is mortified and angry when Sardarji takes Roop for a wife, a woman whose low status Satya takes as an affront to her position, and she adopts desperate measures to maintain her place in society and in her husband's heart. Yet it is also Sardarji's story, as the India he knows and understands — the temples, cities, villages and countryside, all so vividly evoked — begins to change. The escalating tensions in his personal life reflect those between Hindu and Muslim that lead to the cleaving of India and trap the Sikhs in a horrifying middle ground. Deeply imbued with the languages, customs and layered history of colonial India, What the Body Remembers is an absolute triumph of storytelling. Never before has a novel of love and partition been told from the point of view of the Sikh minority, never before through Sikh women's eyes. This is a novel to read, treasure and admire that, like its two compelling heroines, resists all efforts to be put aside. Out of the rich culture of India and the brutal drama of the 1947 Partition comes this lush and eloquent debut novel about two women married to the same man. Roop is a young girl whose mother has died and whose father is deep in debt. So she is elated to learn she is to become the second wife of a wealthy Sikh landowner in a union beneficial to both. For Sardaji's first wife, Satya, has failed to bear him children. Roop believes that she and Satya, still very much in residence, will be friends. But the relationship between the older and younger woman is far more complex. And, as India lurches toward independence, Sardarji struggles to find his place amidst the drastic changes