SILENT WALLS, SPEAKING STONES

In Chawla’s multigenerational family saga, a girl born to a Muslim mother and a Hindu father reflects on the turmoil of her home city of Ayodhya, India.

Saanvi Trivedi is born on December 6th, 1992, the same day the Babri Masjid, an important 16th-century mosque, is demolished by Hindu extremists. In place of the mosque, the Hindus intend to build a temple to the god Rama. Because she was born to a Muslim mother, Yasmin Khan, and a Hindu father, Ramesh Trivedi, her birth bucks the ages of conflict that characterize Ayodhya. Her father, an academic who eventually pivots to politics, met and fell in love with her mother, a poet, in Lucknow, India; the two eloped in a clandestine marriage in a small Hindu temple. Ramesh and Yasmin are both the children of politicians and activists on opposite sides of the Babri Masjid / Ram temple debate; Yasmin’s father is a Muslim organizer who is galvanized into action after the killing of his son by a Hindu mob, while Ramesh’s father helped spearhead the movement to build the Ram temple. Yasmin learns that her own mother converted to Islam and was disowned by her family for marrying a Muslim man. As Saanvi uncovers family histories, her relationship with her parents is tested when her father becomes involved in the Hindu Party, against the wishes of both Saanvi and her mother. In these interwoven family narratives, Chawla establishes a very rich sense of place in Ayodhya. The author tackles grief and silence elegantly; the most memorable passages are about Yasmin and her mother coming to terms with the now-empty room of her late brother. But as a whole, the novel is hampered by its nonlinear, often repetitive storytelling; the same event—Saanvi’s birth—gets replayed over and over again, while Saanvi as a character remains opaque. (“My heart was pungent with a very complex mix of emotions,” she muses, rather vaguely.) The novel is about turmoil, but it offers little insight into the person underneath the murky tidepool of conflicting allegiances.

An ambitious novel hampered by its convoluted structure.