Award-winning journalist Sadiya Ansari's deeply personal investigation of a family secret with lingering consequences.
In a deeply personal investigation, award-winning journalist Sadiya Ansari takes us across three continents and back a century as she seeks the truth behind a family secret. Why did her grandmother Tahira abandon her seven children to follow a man from Karachi to a tiny village in Punjab? And though she eventually left the man, Tahira remained estranged from her children for nearly two decades. Who was she in those years when she was no longer a wife or mother? For Sadiya herself, uninterested in marriage and children, the question begets another: What space is available to women who defy cultural expectations?
Through her inquiry, Sadiya discovers what her daadi's life was like during that separation and she confronts difficult historical truths: the pervasiveness of child marriage, how Partition made refugees of millions of families like hers, and how the national freedoms achieved in 1947 did not extend to women's lives. She sees the threads of this history woven through each generation after and finds an unexpected sense of belonging in a culture that, at first blush, shuns women for wanting lives of their own.
• Every family has a hidden history and the process of uncovering the past can be equally absorbing. Complex family dynamics and unconventional lives are relatable.
• There's been an explosion of Pakistani culture that has resonated globally especially in the last few years-from music (Aroof Aftab, Ali Sethi + Shae Gill), film (Joyland), art (Salmon Toor). Series like “Sort Of” (CBC/HBO) exploring what it means to be accepted for who you are as someone raised in a conservative immigrant household.
• Stories and histories like Ansari's challenge colonial legacies.
• This is for the reader who is interested in excavating family secrets, what gets passed down over generations when secrets are kept, and revisiting history from a woman's perspective.
