Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, Daisy Rockwell (Translator)

​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.
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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.

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