What the Body Remembers

Zusatztext ?This ambitious debut shines.?? Entertainment Weekly Informationen zum Autor Shauna Singh Baldwin was born in Montreal and grew up in India. A former polo player and radio producer, she is presently an e-commerce consultant and lives with her Irish-American husband in Milwaukee. She is the author of English Lessons and Other Stories and coauthor of A Foreign Visitor's Survival Guide to North America . Her short stories have been published widely and have won numerous prestigious literary prizes in the United States, Canada, and India. The story "Satya," which was to become What the Body Remembers , was awarded the Saturday Night/CBC Literary Prize and was nominated for a National Magazine Award in Canada. Klappentext 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. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, What the Body Remembers is at once poetic, political, feminist, and sensual. Rawalpindi, Undivided India, 1937 Satya's heart is black and dense as a stone within her. She tells herself she pities Roop, but hears laughter answering her--how difficult it is to deceive yourself when you have known yourself a full forty-two years. She has a servant summon Roop to her sitting room in the afternoon, when Sardarji has gone to a canal engineers' meeting. When she comes before her, Satya does not speak, but rises from the divan and takes Roop's chunni from her shoulders, as if in welcome, so she can study the girl. She takes Roop's chin and raises her face to the afternoon sun, willing it to blind her, but it will do her no such service. She studies Roop's features, her Pothwari skin, smooth as a new apricot beckoning from the limb of a tall tree, her wide, heavily lashed brown eyes. Unlike Satya's grey ones, they are demurely lowered, innocent. A man could tell those eyes anything and they would believe him, a man could kiss those red lips for hours and they would look fuller and more luscious for the bruising. Roop's hair is long, to her thighs, softened by amla and scented with coconut. Unlike Satya's, it has no need yet for henna. Satya lifts Roop's plait around her shoulder and examines the tip--too few split ends; it has felt the scissors once at least, if not more. Roop is a new Sikh, then, an uncomprehending carrier of the orthodoxy resurging in them all. Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, they are like the three strands of her hair, a strong rope against the British, but separate nevertheless. She unbinds Roop's hair. It falls, a moonlit river, down the valley of her spine. She examines Roop's teeth and finds all of them whole, the back ones barely visible. She hopes that as they come they will bring pain. Roop's tongue is soft and a healthy pink and from it a man will hear no truths he cannot explain away. She presses her fingers to Roop's cheekbones, they are high, like her own. Some remnant of Afghan blood in their past; in other circumstances she might have been Roop's aunt or cousin. Satya's hands drop to Roop's neck and encircle it lightly, for she is not trying to frighten her. And she sees Sardarji has given her a kantha necklace, one of her own. She knows the gold of this one well; she ordered it from the goldsmith herself, she knows every l...

Product details

• Authors: Shauna Singh Baldwin
• Publisher: Anchor Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 16.01.2001
• EAN: 9780385496056
• ISBN: 978-0-385-49605-6
• No. of pages: 496
• Dimensions: 133 mm x 203 mm x 26 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature