What The Body Remembers

"Yes. Away from the sordid realities of South Asian politics, Shauna Singh Baldwin’s fiction offers a fresher, warmer and reflective perspective, though no less melancholy. What the Body Remembers is a story of two Sikh women married to a landowning Sardariji from Rawalpindi, who has an engineering degree from Balliol and lives a very disciplined life trying to combine both East and West in his person and profession. His privileged life is, however, beset by the lack of any offspring from his first wife, Satya, a dynamic woman in her own right, until he is persuaded to marry Roop from the small hamlet Pari Darwaza. Roop’s father is a Sikh by conviction, though originally comes from a Hindu background yet is devoted to his creed and is an industrious farmer whose wife’s early death leaves him with two children. Brought up in a multi-cultural milieu, Roop sees her husband only after marriage and settles well in Rawalpindi both with Sardarji and Satya. The birth of her children bring joy to the household but also engender tensions, which often converge with the rising communal dissension in a plural Punjab, until the events turn riotous. Harrowed by personal frustrations yet still inherently faithful to her religion and husband, Satya is empowered by political developments in India and is no more comfortable with the status-quo-ist attitudes of the Indian upstartish middle class. Her own end at Punja Sahib in Hasan Abdal coincides with the sad mayhem across Punjab where all the four communities take it out on one another. Sardarji’s family, including Roop with her baby daughter, is able to make it to Delhi, only after harrowing escapes through a senseless communal mêlée. In their ‘escape’ they are helped by faithful friends, including some Muslims, yet all around it becomes a tale of bloodshed, dislocation, morass and mass migrations. Roop is the narrator of the story and in her real life happens to be our author’s grandmother, who lived to a ripe old age in the 1990s and passed away after transferring the Pothowari-Punjabi folklores to Shauna Baldwin. The grandma spoke her own mother tongue and reminisced about her life in Pari Darwaza among her Muslim friends and Hindu cousins until she shifted to Rawalpindi, followed by Sardarji’s transfers to Punjab’s canal colonies and Lahore. Her name was tattooed in Urdu, reminding her of her childhood, which, despite its parallel strands of faith-based identifications, often went beyond communal segregation."