Rajkamal Prakashan Ret Smadhi (Hb)

Grandma, nearing eighty, widowed and turned her back on the family, took to her bed. The family tried to pull her back into their fold. A joint family seething with love, hatred, and mutual bickering. Grandma insists, I wont get up now. Then the sound of those words changes to, I will get up anew. Grandma wakes up. Absolutely new. A new childhood, a new youth, free from social taboos and prohibitions, completely free in new relationships and attitudes. Sand-Samadhi is not only the epic tale of an extraordinary woman hidden within every ordinary woman, but also a unique depiction of the contemporary state of the joint family, the current state of the country, and the fate of ordinary human beings. And theres an immortal love affair and an unforgettable character like Rosie. This novel offers a new dimension to fiction writing. Its story, its chronology, its sensitivity, its narration, all unfold in their own unique way, defying and transcending our familiar boundaries. Even the familiar is completely unique and new here. Its world is both familiar and magical, blurring the distinction between the two. Time itself exists here in its continuity. Every happening holds past happenings, and every moment dormant centuries. For example, the aggressive Indian and Pakistani nationalist demonstrations that take place every evening at the Wagah border echo the voices of massacres returned from the past, and the long shadows of time remain confined to the everyday life of a joint family. And there are also borders that this work transcends, making it unique: men and women, young and old, body and mind, love and hatred, sleep and wakefulness, joint and nuclear families, India and Pakistan, humans and other creatures (its not without reason that the story is often narrated through the sounds of a butterfly, a crow, a partridge, a road, or an ancestral door), or prose and poetry: Tears fall like stones, like raindrops.