It isn’t often that I feel compelled to read a book in just two or three sittings. I love word play and cleverly crafted sentences, provided they don’t slow me (and the action) down too much. However, even though the ending of the novel was clear and inevitable to me soon after the very first scene, I had to witness the denouement of the story for myself, and didn’t notice the time I had been glued to my Kindle.

The central story concerns motherhood and how each woman’s genes have arrived through two generations of other women; so, essentially, it is also a story of the conflict (or balance?) between nature and nurture.

Women in general provide the bad genes here, whereas men are simply weak and at least partly complicit in the outcomes initiated by their partners. The narrator delves back into the blood and guts of childbirth and the mess of parenting in order to try and find answers to why her daughter is behaving in the way she is. Sometimes there just doesn’t seem to be a reason, and this is the journey we embark upon with her as readers.

I felt a great empathy with the main character’s sense of emptiness and a lifetime of relative futility as a result of other women’s actions, whether derived or driven. This resonated with me most throughout the story in the way it transcended even the worst kinds of cruelty, neglect and unimaginable (actually, easy to imagine through such well-constructed words as these) grief.

There is also a well-worn theme of apparent favouritism from parents, though, of course this is usually to be frowned upon and deemed unacceptable behaviour – or would be if such thoughts are actually voiced. Not, however, in a work of fiction where everything (sometimes literally) is turned on its head.

I don’t understand why some readers found this book so difficult to understand and/or did not progress between the first chapter, or those initial introductory paragraphs. Surely it is better to have those onion slices peeled away slowly, to put off the orgasm of relief and true knowledge for as long as possible?

The characters propelled me forward, though I did find things a little repetitive towards the end and felt the book was too long because of that. I didn’t find myself in emotional suspense, as the author herself would have it, but, at the same time, I had to see how what I had suspected would happen all along did happen.

As a parent I still remember fondly the very young years of each of our three children. What I do recall in particular was a sense of malevolence when certain of their peers would attend birthday parties or come round for tea. In most of those cases, though not all, my suspicions subsequently proved entirely justified. Not bad for a mere man?

​This is a book like no other I have ever read before. An original take on an Indian family where objects become human-like, and nature that thrives all around us is given a platform to tell its own stories. The prose is simply breath-taking, with an almost poetic rhythm, but also witty and very funny and pointed in places.

The story concerns an eighty-year-old woman – Ma - who becomes depressed after losing her husband, takes to her bed and spends her days looking through a crack in the wall. But what does she (and we) really see? This is the nub of the story.

Eventually Ma rises and leaves her comfortable upper-class home (funded by state ‘corruption’) and indirectly arrives at the home of her daughter, Beti, who has already rebelled against the norms and expectations of Indian society. Not only that, but Ma also befriends a hijra (transgender) woman – Rosie - and the ‘bohemian’ set is complete.

With the strength and resolve that this brings to her otherwise ‘traditional’ meaning largely invisible life, Ma travels back to Pakistan, seeing the border as, instead of separation, a bridge between two worlds and two periods of her life, blocked by Partition. At the end of the story, we see what Ma has been looking at all along through that chink in the wall, as she is finally resolved.

As a story of liberation and ultimately healing, I do think Tomb of Sand works, but I wish we could have travelled back to Pakistan with Ma far earlier than we did. We were at least two thirds through a 700+ page book before being invited to join them on their journey. What followed felt rushed to me and not explored nearly as deeply as I had hoped. To market the book as one about the trauma of Partition is accurate in terms of the key driver of the book, yet not at all in terms of its balance.
​
A huge number of families on both sides of the border (or bridge) with similar preferences and desires will be forever estranged. Not for them the guard and maid of Ma’s comfortable neighbourhood, nor two thirds of a book in which to contemplate the almost spiritual nature of all life.