Source of book: Audiobook from the library
This book was a Newbery honor book in 2019. It is inspired by the author’s father’s experience after the partition of India in 1947, although his experience was fairly easy. The harrowing story in the book, however, is very real for many of those who fled in the aftermath of independence and partition.
I’ll mention the fun coincidence of the author, characters, and my own life. My very first violin teacher was (like the author’s mother), a Jewish woman married to a Hindu man, and the older of her two daughters was named Nisha like the protagonist of the story.
When England finally granted independence to India, after centuries of colonialism, things rather blew up. Religious and ethnic strife that had been repressed during British rule, likely combined with repressed rage at the British, flared up, with no easy solutions in sight. It was determined by the various parties negotiating the end of British occupation that the solution they thought would result in the least trouble was to partition India into two countries. Pakistan, to the west, would be predominantly Muslim, while India, to the east, would be more pluralist, but predominantly Hindu. The Sikhs were caught in the middle, in the quasi-disputed middle ground of the Punjab. You can still see the results of this partition and the continued religious strife.
For those living in what is now Pakistan but not Muslim, it was a catastrophe, as sectarian violence exploded, with violence against religious minorities and retaliatory violence claiming tens of thousands of lives. Fifteen million people migrated to India from Pakistan and from Pakistan to India - and an additional two million people never made it, either dying enroute or from violence.
The book is set in this turbulent time.
For young Nisha, her life is upended when her family finds itself not in the India of her birth, but in the new Pakistan. Her mother died in childbirth, leaving her father with twin children, Nisha, and her brother Amil. Complicating the issue is that her father is Hindu, but her mother was Muslim - the marriage was never accepted by her family, and, with the exception of his mother, Dadi, who lives with them, his was never warm toward the marriage.
Nisha doesn’t know what she is or where she fits. She loves her father, but her best true friend is the family’s muslim cook, Kazi, who gives her a notebook for her birthday.
Both children have disabilities. Amil has what we would call dyslexia, although it wasn’t known by that name in the 1940s. He cannot read, and claims the marks on the page keep moving. Nisha, on the other hand, has trouble speaking. This may be genetic, as we discover, because her mother’s brother is completely mute, although he can read and write. One of the plot points in the book is Nisha’s struggle to find her voice.
Unfortunately, the violence around their family grows, despite Nisha’s father being a well respected doctor. They are forced to flee on foot, as the trains have been increasingly taken over by violent thugs, who kill men, women, and children of the other religion.
Nisha cannot understand why religion has to be such a big deal. In the midst of this, she starts writing in her notebook - a kind of diary directed toward her late mother. This becomes the story.
I won’t spoil the escape, but it involves some pretty harrowing and scary moments, so unexpected human connections, and some tough family dynamics. Let’s just say that fleeing for your life doesn’t make people their best selves, and trauma affects everyone. Because this is a children’s book, the level at which these issues are experienced and discussed is age appropriate.
The characters are realistic, and complicated. There is no true villain, although there are some mean bullying kids, and mean, bullying adults as one might expect in a story like this. The ones that are more than a brief, faceless experience become more complicated, and the author does a great job of showing how escalating cycles of violence work, with every side trying to revenge its own wrongs. In so many of these situations, there is no resolution in which every side isn’t suffering some injustice.
As one myself who is horrified at are current political moment, where we have real threat of religious violence from the fundamentalists in our country, I found Nisha’s sorrow at the crumbling of her country and the civility that was lost. Religion need not divide us - men and women of good will can find they have more in common with each other regardless of religion, or no religion at all. We do not need to hate each other, or seek to impose our own beliefs on others.
This book was a good audiobook as well, read by Priya Ayyar, who captures the delicate and youthful voice of Nisha as she tells the tale of her life.
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