Tag Archives: India

In My Hands Today…

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Sisters of the Sari – Brenda L. Baker

While vacationing in India, Kiria Langdon, the opinionated and driven CEO of a major company, meets Santoshi, a former slave who now works as a cleaning lady and lives in a shelter for homeless women in Chennai. Appalled by the conditions in the shelter, Kiria becomes obsessed with the idea of building decent housing for poor working women in India. Santoshi reluctantly agrees to help, even though she thinks Kiria’s ideas are too crazy to succeed.

Embarking on a rich journey of personal discovery, both women will learn invaluable lessons about themselves as they forge a powerful bond of sisterhood across the barriers of language and culture-a bond that makes anything possible.

In My Hands Today…

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Someone Else’s Garden – Dipika Rai

The eldest of seven children,born low-caste and female in rural India,Mamta is abused and rejected by a father whocan see no reason to “water someone else’s garden” until ahusband is found for her. Seeking escape in matrimony, Mamta beginsher wedded life with hope—but is soon forced to flee her village and thehorrors of her arranged marriage to the bustle of a small city. Saved from becomingone of the nameless and faceless millions of rejected humanity by thesalvation of sublime love, Mamta struggles to find a precarious state ofacceptance and make peace with her past.

In My Hands Today…

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The Blue Bedspread – Raj Kamal Jha

In the middle of a steamy Calcutta night the phone rings. An unnamed man in a city of millions answers to a voice telling him that his long-lost sister is dead. He must go to the hospital to identify the body and claim his sister’s orphaned newborn daughter until she can be adopted the next day.

During the long hot night, the baby sleeps on a bedspread that used to be indigo blue, but has faded to almost white. As the child lies where the man and his sister used to sleep as children, he quietly writes stories for her, telling of his own childhood full of intensity, anguish, and poetry. He doesn’t know his place in the world, but with the help of these stories, the baby someday might.

In My Hands Today…

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In the Convent of Little Flowers – Indu Sundaresan

A young woman who was adopted by an American family in Seattle receives a letter from Sister Mary Theresa, nun at the Convent of Little Flowers in Chennai where she stayed as a child. Unbeknownst to her, the nun is her biological mother’s sister. The grandmother of an Indian journalist begs him to intervene with her husband — his grandfather — to prevent a young widow from being burned alive. A child born out of wedlock to the sixteen-year-old daughter of a peon on an engineering college campus throws the entire family into turmoil.

With the lush prose, vividly rendered settings, complex and appealing characters, and compelling narratives, the stories that comprise In the Convent of Little Flowers illuminate the lives of Indians at home and abroad today, where modernity offers them opportunities that their grandmothers only dreamed of, while others experience just as much oppression as ever.

In My Hands Today…

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Untouchable – Mulk Raj Anand

Bakha is a young man, proud and even attractive, yet none the less he is an outcast in India’s caste system: an Untouchable. This novel describes a day in the life of Bakha, sweeper and toilet-cleaner, as he searches for a meaning to the tragic existence he has been born into – and comes to an unexpected conclusion.