Land Where I Flee

Two years ago, Prajwal Parajuly’s wonderful début collection, The Gurkha’s Daughter, saw him hailed in literary circles as a major new talent. Now he returns with a novel-length offering, a family saga that expands on several of the same themes that had so enhanced his short stories.

To help celebrate their grandmother’s milestone 84th birthday, her Chaurasi, four ethnic-Nepali siblings return from their own far-flung lives to the Indian Himalayan state of Sikkim, and the Gantok home in which they were raised.

Eighteen years have passed since they were all together, and each has known their share of personal turmoil. Grudges are held, jealousies linger, and tension is high.

Aamaa Chitralekha, their grandmother, a woman of great wealth and influence, had raised them, abetted by her faithful eunuch servant, Prasanti, following the car crash that had taken the lives of their parents.

Far from enjoying a privileged upbringing, though, her strict and domineering nature ensured that their childhoods held little happiness.

Their pasts and presents define them.

For decades, Bhagwati was shunned by her grandmother — and by extension, the family — for the sin of eloping, as a teen, to marry a low-caste Damaai. Life since has been a great struggle, raising a family in the face of abject poverty, first in Nepalese refugee camps and now working menial jobs in Boulder, Colorado.

Manasa is even more bitter.

Oxbridge-educated, she was coerced into an arranged marriage with a political family and now finds herself living in London, a full-time slave not only to her husband but to his sick and highly demanding father.

And, in his mid-thirties, Agastaya, an oncologist in New York, remains a bachelor. Secretly gay, he is harassed by the parade of relentlessly suggested matches.

The fourth sibling, Ruthwa is not invited to the celebration, but arrives anyway. A writer, he shot to fame with a scandalous bestselling novel, based closely on a terrible family story, that of his grandmother’s rape. Then with his next book, it was discovered that he’d plagiarised passages of VS Naipaul’s Half A Life, and everything fell apart.

Now desperate to rebuild his career, he plans to write a book on the house-servant Prasanti and India’s transgender population, the hijras. And as a first step on the road back to redemption, he pens an article on the current political situation, the movement pushing independent statehood for Gorkhaland.

But with Aamaa’s Chaurasi drawing near, it is impossible to predict the shattering impact that the article will have on the family and town

In clean, precise prose, Mr Parajuly’s story unfolds through its finely rendered characters.

Tension holds the strands of plot in place, building to a thoroughly satisfying climax. The result is an eminently admirable novel.