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Title: An Unrestored Woman

Author: Shobha Rao

Narrator: Neela Vaswani

Format: Unabridged

Length: 6 hrs and 59 mins

Language: English

Release date: 03-15-16

Publisher: Macmillan Audio

Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 6 votes

Genres: Fiction, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

In her mesmerizing debut, Shobha Rao recounts the untold human costs of one of the largest migrations in history.

It's 1947. The Indian subcontinent is partitioned into two separate countries, India and Pakistan. And with one decree, countless lives are changed forever. An Unrestored Woman explores the fault lines in this mass displacement of humanity: A new mother is trapped on the wrong side of the border; a soldier finds the love of his life but is powerless to act on it; an ambitious servant seduces both master and mistress; a young prostitute quietly, inexorably plots revenge on the madam who holds her hostage. Caught in a world of shifting borders, Rao's characters have reached their tipping points.

In paired stories that hail from India and Pakistan to the United States, Italy, and England, we witness the ramifications of the violent uprooting of families, the price they pay over generations, and the uncanny relevance these stories have in our world today.

Members Reviews:

Another Best New Fiction Book of the Week Pick

I first came across Shobha Rao's work in this past fall's Best American Short Stories which included Kavitha and Mustafa, a story about a young Indian woman in a train that was attacked by bandits. As she does in all of her work, Rao deftly combines the ordinary with the extraordinary. Although the setting is the Indian border at the time of the Partition, the readers are confined to the single train car in which the characters are trapped. We feel the heat of too many people in a motionless box and see the women silently trying to hide their jewels in their shoes. The heroine is in many ways an ordinary person who has led a sadly constrained life. She has never had any kind of power; the only way she can even say her last goodbye to her husband is by pressing her head wordlessly against his knobby shoulder, and yet she seizes salvation when it comes in the form of two pebbles, a length of twine, and a smart little boy. Grounded in one humble detail after another, Kavitha and Mustafa ends in a kind of triumph that could be read as a love story to all the impoverished Muslims and Hindus who struggled to survive during a violent era. Neither the woman nor the boy is an allegorical figure, however; Rao has created intensely real people with a dignity that demands that they be seen as individuals.

Almost all of the stories in this collection involve escape in one form or another, escape from a brothel or a bad Manhattan marriage, from a camp for widowed women, from the unbearable sadness of having lost a child, or from prosecution for the crime of murder. In many stories a terrible moment comes when the characters realize that the more or less settled lives they had imagined for themselves are no longer possible. It is worth quoting at length the thoughts of Renu who looks at the Shivalik mountains and remembers how she had once imagined that,

The Shivaliks would stand like they always stood against the morning sky, whipped and creamy like clotted ghee, and that the dandelions would bend like baby's heads in the northeasterly wind, and that she would be a farmer's wife, with its days of toil and earth and anguish, measuring the rains as one measure sugar into a teacup, with care and constancy, and by the spoonful. And she assumed something further: that her destiny was like the small stream that ran at the edge of their property.