Undertow

At twenty-five, Loya is a quiet, earnest young woman who has never quite known what to do with the restlessness stirring inside her. Then she does something unlike her: she leaves her mother, Rukmini, and their home in Bengaluru and travels to the misty far reaches of Assam. Part of what draws her there is her love of the Asian elephant, Elephas maximus. The other part is a man she has never met, her grandfather, Torun Ram Goswami. She finds him at the Yellow House, which stands on the banks of the Brahmaputra. Twenty-five years earlier, Rukmini was driven out of this house by her own mother, the formidable and charismatic Usha, while Torun stood by and said nothing. Loya arrives wanting answers, from the old man and from the place her mother once called home, without suspecting how much the visit will change her. As she searches, Loya comes to understand more about herself and her own life, and about how fragile the ties are that hold people together. Jahnavi Barua uses the story of one family and its silences to look at wider questions: what home means and what lies beyond it, what it is to belong or to be a stranger, and how love keeps changing over time.