Tomb of Sand

 by Geetanjali Shree

This book won the Booker International Prize this year.  It is a massive book, more than 700 pages.

I found the book interesting but a bit frustrating. I enjoyed the creativity and the story but the author has many chapters of "jibber jabber" which may or may not have related to the story itself.  If this had been taken out the book could have been half its length.

The story is about primarily about an old woman in India.  After her husband dies she is living with her son and basically gives up on live.  Refusing to get up or leave her room.  Then one day her grandson gives her a cane with butterflies on it and all of sudden people come to her for her blessings.  

One day the old woman goes awol.  When they find her her daughter, a freelance writer, decides to take her mother home to stay with her for a while.  The daughter is happy to have her mother with her as the mother seems to perk up staying with her.  However, this disrputs her relationship with her boyfriend.

The book is interesting as it tells how the various family members react to and interact with the old woman.  The wife of the son keeps phoning her son who lives in Australia to explain the antics of the old woman and get his advice.

The daughter is pleased to have her mother with her but is concerned that her mother develops to close a relationship with a two spirited person, the female figure a healer, the male figure a tailor.  This person seems to come to control the old woman including convincing her to leave saris behind and just wear long dresses.

The old woman is distraught when she finds out her two spirited person has died/been murdered.  She then insists that she wants to travel to Pakistan/Kashmir.  Is she determined to finish a mission for her murdered friend?  The daughter agrees to travel with her and they do a bit of touring hosted by embassy officials but the old woman gets to places she is not supposed to travel and gets arrested.  The woman and her daughter are treated quite well in prison but the old woman gives the police interviewers a lot of difficulty as she answers nonsense to their questions.

Eventually the old woman asks to see a government official.  She eventually meets him but realizes it is father she wants to see.  She eventually is released from jail and gets to see the old man who may have been her first husband.  With the partition of Pakistan/Kashmir and India did she get displaced from her first husband?  That is what it looks like.   Leaving the old man's home she is shot and dies, as was predicted at the start of the book where it mentioned that she practiced getting pushed and hit so that when she fell down she would die face up.

A fascinating, sometimes confusing and overly verbose book but I could see why it was justified to win the Booker.