what the body remembers by shauna singh baldwin

The foreground is taken by the almost lyrically told story of Sardarji and his two wives.

Almost similarly, Baldwin structures the book on three broad frames - Partition, patriarchy and, for want of a more appropriate word, feminism. Their husband, the England-returned engineer Sardarji, finds purpose and meaning in his work and in the complexity of numbers, figures and drawings. The teenaged Roop hopes that she would be like a younger sister to the first wife, who, in turn, has been hit hard by being upstaged even her jewellery has been handed over to the younger girl. His second wife is the young Roop, whose mother is dead and the father is deep in debt. When his first wife, Satya, is unable to give him a child, the wealthy landowner remarries. From pages where one can almost smell the smoke of the chulhas and watch wheat being winnowed, this is the story of the two wives of Sardarji. The story opens in pre-Partition India - in an area now in Pakistan. The delicacy of prose belies the robustness of narrative. What the Body Remembers is a powerful story that can place itself in the tradition of grand story-telling.The theme is bold, the sweep of the compass is wide and it is filled with vividly drawn characters, including carefully crafted cameos. This had followed two of her earlier books, A Foreign Visitor’s Survival Guide to America (1992) and English Lessons and Other Stories (1996). It is two decades since Shauna Singh Baldwin’s debut novel, What the Body Remembers, was published and immediately placed her in the literary limelight.

What the body remembers by shauna singh baldwin