The central character of the novel is Maa, a woman in her eighties who decides to cast off the tomb of set roles and responsibilities her life was settling into, transcend boundaries—geographic, emotional, and social—and travel to Pakistan to settle unfinished business, which is as personal as it is political.
Around her are her son and daughter, both faltering within the rules they have chosen to uphold and defy. And then there is Rosie Bua, whose placement outside social brackets is not by her choice. “Once you’ve got women and a border, a story can write itself,” the novel declares.
The book is dedicated to author Krishna Sobti, and you find in it echoes of Sobti’s Ae Ladki, with the madness and magic of Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.
If you are curious about the book but unsure about reading it, here are three reasons why this should be the next work you should pick up.
For the fun, flavour, felicity of its prose
Ret Samadhi is neither a quick nor an easy read. But the prose is rewarding—dense yet clear, chaotic but wise. The book has a lot to say, and it says so rambunctiously, defying time and form, dancing across timelines, meandering off into reflective paths, and switching narrators at a giddy pace.
At one point, crows sit on a tree with the son and take notes as he dreams/remembers/hallucinates about the saris he has bought Maa, complete with a line about each sari’s craft. One of these crows later befriends a partridge in Pakistan, revealing the reason will be a major spoiler. At another, a beam of sunlight follows Maa across the house, playing with her, lavishing itself on her, then getting embarrassed as it realises it is too clingy.
But through all the cartwheels, you know Shree’s grip on the narrative is not slipping, the stunts are the assured leaps of an author who knows she is well in command, and well-worth keeping pace with.
For the treatment of femininity, feminism
The book has three women, Maa, Bahu, and Beti, and a transgender, Rosie Bua. While Maa is introduced only as Maa, her first name, Chandraprabha, is revealed to us towards the end of the book, in Pakistan, when she has ceased being a generic ‘mother’ and become her very own person. We meet Maa when she has taken to the bed, turned her face to the wall, refusing to participate in a world her husband has recently left.
Her return to selfhood is described in little, telling, tender details—the old woman discovering her body anew, every ache, every boil, the proof of a functional physical self, capable of carrying out one’s will. In a world where women’s bodies are about desire or assault, and their illnesses hypochondria or tragedy, this depiction of an old woman’s body is something everyone needs to read.
While Maa is the surprise unfolding page after page, Beti’s dilemmas are familiar. She is the daughter who walked out and who has shunned social conventions to lead a life she has crafted to the last elegantly careless detail. And yet, the role of a caregiver, a “family woman” returns to her when she decides to take in her depressed mother. The daughter, we are informed, is not married, writes of women’s orgasms, and attends dinner parties at the President’s House, but when her mother moves in with her, is felled by the seeti, ghanti, and choodi, (the pressure cooker’s whistles, ringing phones and doorbells, clinking glass bangles), the background music of humdrum domesticity.
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While Beti believes she is modern and free-minded, her mother’s increasing chumminess with Rosie Bua discomfits her. Beti’s struggles with who she thought she was and who she is becoming are told sardonically, but sympathetically.
Bahu is the archetypal daughter-in-law, who has made the “inside” her domain, but feeling under-appreciated and misunderstood, dons ‘Reeboks’ to claim some of the outside space. Rosie Bua, at society’s margins but making her presence strongly felt, seems initially to be the force turning Maa into Chandraprabha but is finally found to have much deeper ties with the persons and personalities of Maa who is Chandraprabha as well as Chanda.
Maa’s son, Bade, is the Responsible Elder Son who is fast turning into his father, who doesn’t know how to have heart-to-heart conversations with his mother and sister because which manly man does. And yet, mischievously, Shree slips in that as a child, Bade was rather auratana, effeminate, “sitting down like a girl” to hear stories.
For the Hindi, it will make you recall
If you are a Hindi speaker, you probably did not learn the language in classrooms. You picked it up from overheard conversations with your parents, grandparents, domestic help, and your school vanwallah. The many dialects and expressions you heard, even if not registered, are stored in your brain somewhere. Reading Shree’s prose will have all this wealth of language bubbling back up.
Every language has its own rhythm, its idioms, and its syntax of thought and feeling. Hindi, absorbing so much from so many dialects, is a swollen river, which Shree unleashes in all its potent force. And if you are a Hindi speaker who mostly reads English literature, pick up this book for its very refreshing wisdom and cadence, which will feel equally new and familiar at the same time.
The cover of Tomb of Sand, written by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell. (Source: Amazon.in) 
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