In six pairs of short stories rooted in India and Pakistan in 1947, Shobha Rao explores the most painful parts of the human experience -- love thwarted, indifference magnified. These are young stolen mothers whose babies belong to the wrong country, gay and straight men and women who can't have their loves, trafficked prostitutes who attack their madam, and more in that vein.

I came into this expecting historical fiction about Partition, especially about the experiences of women and girls migrating across the India-Pakistan border to live in the country of the "right" religion. I didn't get Partition history at all -- this book is story after story of melodramatic hardship. Partition is part of the backstory, but only one story really needed Partition to provide its core -- the rest are just about impossible lives and trafficking. The book was too depressing and too ahistorical for me, so I was happy to return it without finishing the final 20 pages. That said, others seem to adore this book, so your mileage may vary. ( )

So just days after reviewing Stone Mattress by Margaret Atwood – I have another collection of short stories to tell you about. An Unrestored Woman a very powerful collection, first published last year in the USA, this new paperback edition apparently timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the Partition of the India into what is became the separate nations of India and Pakistan – perhaps that is a coincidence though I suspect not.

“We leave. We leave the places we’re born, the places we’re meant to die, and we wander into the world as defenceless as children. Against such wilderness, such desert.”

For all the stories in this collection take the ramifications of Partition as their theme. However, not all the stories take place in 1947 – in fact Shobha Rao’s stories show how the effects of Partition continued to be felt many, many years after the events surrounding Partition itself.

There are twelve stories in An Unrestored Woman, six pairs of linked stories. This pairing of stories is particularly clever, allowing us an alternative viewpoint – the two halves creating a more complex whole across the two stories. Shobhan Rao writes beautifully of displacement, love, ambitious seduction and revenge. Characters commit murder, take on cross gender identities, embark upon perilous journeys and suffer horrible abuses. I found many of the male characters to be either thoroughly unpleasant or cowardly weak. It is probably unsurprising that it is generally women and children who suffer the worst abuses, rape, coercion and abduction feature. I didn’t find Rao’s writing to be in any way gratuitous – there was a sensitive, understanding to her depiction of these terrible events – an honesty.

In these stories; we meet women trapped into early marriages with men who treat them as objects. Those sold into the sex industry, and the unrestored women who having been abducted during the violent upheaval of Partition – are forcibly returned to the homes where they are no longer wanted. We meet a child who makes a miraculous escape when a train is attacked, an elderly man with dementia confusing the past with the present. A woman in 1990s America meets an elderly Englishman who served in India during Partition, and a young man working for the Indian Geographical Society, takes the opportunity to advance his romantic aspirations when he goes to a village to survey the border between India and East Pakistan.

“He returned an hour later and told her he’s secured passage for her on a bus headed for a nearby camp. It was set up by the Indian government, he said.
‘For what?’ she asked
‘For items that are useless.’ He said ‘Like you’”

The collection opens with the title story An Unrestored Woman in which Neela, believing the husband she never cared for is dead, finds herself briefly in a camp for ‘Refugees and Unrestored Women’. Here Neela meets Renu, and for the short time they are together, the two are inseparable. In The Merchant’s Mistress, Renu is an ambitious servant, seducing both her master and mistress, on her way to a better life.

Jenkins working for the Imperial Police in the story of the same name, finds himself falling dangerously in love. Fifty years later we meet Jenkins again working as an apartment building doorman in the US, in Unleashed. A young woman turns to drink when she uncovers a terrible betrayal. In her misery, she recalls her childhood and adolescence in the company of her sister.

Blindfold tells the devastating story of a child stolen for the sex industry and the carefully plotted revenge the girl visits upon the cruel madam who has held her hostage for years. In the The Lost Ribbon, we have a Hindu woman ‘recovered’ from her Pakistani captor, who makes an unbelievably appalling decision.

A young cartographer in The Opposite of Sex, is desperate to marry the daughter of a wealthy local man, he realises that moving the dividing line between what will soon be East Pakistan and India through the village, he can effectively ruin the father of the girl he dreams of marrying, and so improve his own chances of winning her. Many years later, that young man’s boss Alok Debnath is now an elderly man suffering from dementia in Such a mighty river. As Alok goes in search of a local prostitute whose services he has used regularly, his mind keeps returning to the past when he was first married to his beloved late wife. Unknown to him, Alok is vulnerable and in danger.

“My wife comes into the room, shutting out the sun as she closes the door, and lays the wad of bills on the table in front of me. I can’t look at her. I want to feel shame but I only feel a thin pleasure, like a fine layer of skin, puckered and white and soulless, floating on cooling milk. On another shore, perhaps, the desert has an ashen end; and forests are merely silent folded wings. On that shore poverty doesn’t have an animal stink. And when we touch the face of another, we draw onto their skin a moonlit path, and not the metallic rust of our weakness and our fear.”

During the upheaval of Partition, a married couple embark upon a journey to Mirpur Khas in The Road to Mirpur Khas. The impractical, naïve husband frequently annoys his much sharper wife. Having had the meagre store of money stolen on the road the wife is forced to prostitute herself to aid their journey and their very survival. In the The Memsahib, set I think some years before the events of 1947, a young sweeper becomes obsessed with the imperious daughter of the British family in whose home he and his mother serve. When his attentions are shrugged away, he decides upon a peculiar and terrible revenge.

In Kavitha and Mustafa, a train packed with refugees is attacked, the passengers robbed and beaten, a Hindu woman and a Muslim boy manage to escape by helping one another is a desperate bid to survive. In Curfew, the granddaughter of that boy – now grown up, and living in Britain – goes on holiday with her husband. The couple are still struggling with a terrible grief, their marriage itself at risk.

There is a relentlessness to these stories, but there is also a lot that is beautifully observed and compellingly told. Rao is never sentimental, there is an honesty to her stories which goes some way to telling the rich, complex story of two historically and geographically linked countries. ( )

A finely written series of heartbreaking stories of the damage done to families, and specifically to women, by the ethnic Partition that created Pakistan. Rao's language is so lovely that I know I will reread this for the sheer music of the words and the vivid pictures she paints, as well as the nuanced tales she tells. ( )

Shobha Rao has given us a beautiful collection of 12 subtly interconnected stories that revolve around the Partition of India and Pakistan and the far reaching effects of that event. The book shares its title with the first story. As the author explains, after Partition, the Indian government passed the Abducted Persons (Recovery and Restoration) Act to assist the many women who became victims of the violence between Hindus and Muslims. Here, she has chosen to use the word restored in place of the more commonly used recovered. While woman and children felt the brunt of the conflict, men were not immune, and Rao tells representative stories of a wide variety of persons. An abused child bride, believing her husband has been killed in the burning of a train, experiences a few brief days of peace, love, and freedom. A disgraced British officer, sent to a small, obscure Indian town to serve as lead constable, faces the task of telling his Sikh assistant's wife that she is a widow--and faces secrets of his own. That same man shows up in New York 40 years later as a hotel doorman, a secondary character in the story of a failing marriage and sisterly betrayal. A young man surveying part of the new borderline uses his position in a ploy to wed the young woman he desires--with disastrous consequences. A Hindu teenager, abducted by a brutal Muslim, fears for the safety of the daughter she bears him. A young Hindu woman, grieving a stillborn child and drifting away from her husband, makes a bold move when Muslim raiders board the train they are riding in. A child who survives an attack during Partition violence but hasn't spoken since shows up decades later as the grandfather of a married woman struggled with her own losses. These are not, for the most part, happy stories; they are stories of loss, love, passion, of the struggle against change and the inevitable adjustment to it, and of the perseverance of the human spirit. As one character puts it, the body's will to keep on living overpowers all obstacles. An Unrestored Woman is beautifully written and will take you on an emotional journey that you won't soon forget. ( )

This collection helps with the image of what it was like for indian and pakistani men and women of 1947 that you will not read in textbooks or general lectures. These stories are vivid, gut feeling, and felt in our senses of fear and love for the characters lives. ( )