In exile Rupture, reunion, and my grandmother's secret life

As a first-generation Pakistani growing up in Toronto, journalist Ansari never thought to question the assumed history of the frosty grandmother who shared her bedroom. Despite photos showing her smiling Daadi cuddling other grandchildren, the stern old woman barely spoke except when correcting pronunciation of Quran passages. As an adult, long after Daadi's death, Ansari attempted to write an article about her grandmother but encountered conflicting accounts shrouded in confusion. This engaging combination of memoir, narrative nonfiction, and investigative reporting reflects the tragic truths Ansari painstakingly uncovered: a 14-year-old child bride married to a widower uncle with seven children, widowed herself at age 20 with 11 children, banished after falling in love with another man. These events play out against political uncertainties, financial hardships, and constant uprooting wrought by Partition, compounded by harsh, judgmental family condemnation. Ansari is a good storyteller, whether recounting her sleuthing, her family's migration to the U.S., her contemporary relationships and personal revelations, or recreating the past. Her book brings the plight of women and refugee families into sharp, empathetic focus.

In this triumphant debut, journalist Ansari investigates a family mystery involving her grandmother. Growing up in a large Pakistani family in Toronto, Ansari had a complex relationship with her paternal grandmother, Tahira, who showed little interest in Ansari despite sharing a bedroom with her for years. The only bedtime story Tahira ever told Ansari involved a couple burdened with seven children, whose hopes for a son were never realized. The tale took on new significance when Ansari learned from an aunt that Tahira once left behind a husband and seven children for a new romance. Ten years after Tahira's death, Ansari began asking her father and other family members and friends about her grandmother's past, supplementing her interviews with research about the 1947 partition of India, which Tahira lived through. Ansari learned that, after being widowed in her early 30s, the fiercely religious Tahira pursued a second marriage that eventually fell apart. Ansari paces the account of her investigation like a crime novel, alternating first-person sections with reconstructions of Tahira's life in India and Pakistan, and drawing powerful parallels between Tahira's struggles and her own trepidations about marriage and motherhood. The result is insightful, surprising, and beautifully written. (Aug.)

A Pakistani Canadian journalist investigates the life of her mysterious Pakistani grandmother, a woman who abandoned her family to follow a lover. Ansari never understood Tahira, the taciturn grandmother who lived with the author's family for a decade until she died. Then an aunt casually revealed that Tahira had once walked out on seven children to be with another man. The "strict code of propriety" that governed family interactions kept Ansari from asking questions. However, when she was studying journalism in graduate school, Ansari began to probe her grandmother's past through interviews with family members, historical research, and travel to Pakistan. She learned that Tahira had once dreamed of receiving an education, only to be forced into marriage at 14 to protect her family's economic interests. She became a widowed mother of seven 20 years later just as India was undergoing Partition. Her Muslim faith forced her to move north as a refugee to the new nation of Pakistan, where she struggled to raise her children. It was during this time of hardship that Tahira, lonely and without male protection, met a widower who dazzled her with his knowledge of poetry. Her eldest son, who disapproved of disregard for rules surrounding remarriage, forced her to choose between her lover and children. Tahira chose the former and endured disappointment from her lover and the pain of being separated from children she loved. Ansari succeeds in her goal to recast a vilified grandmother into a feminist heroine who struggled for self-determination in a culture that allowed her no choice. Yet as she reveals, the whole project of writing about Tahira raised many difficult issues, "inflicting damage [on loved ones] under guise of just doing my job" as an investigative reporter committed to the principles of ethical journalism. A thoughtful and informative memoir and familial investigation. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.