I first fell in love with Geetanjali Shree’s writing when, more than a decade ago, I first read Mai. Mai’s narrator is a daughter who cannot understand her mother. The mother is physically bent out of shape, and her children account for it at the very start: ‘We always knew mother had a weak spine. The doctor told us that later.’ The home lies at the heart of Mai; her children dream about leaving it, aggressively abandon it, travel long distances from it, only to return to it, and a daughter’s resentment, the need to ‘narrate’ and ‘save’ Mai, gradually gives way to understanding her. Published in Hindi in 1993, Mai is Shree’s first novel.
Shree followed this intimate story of relations in the home with a second novel in 1998. This novel is Hamara Shahar Us Baras. Just a few pages into the translation by Daisy Rockwell, you realize that it is not cast in the same mould as Mai; that it is definitely not that kind of book. Here, a city burns and its four protagonists who all share a home in the city are at a loss to do anything about it. The novel evokes events and horrors that unfolded around the Babri Masjid’s demolition in 1992.