A Mirror Greens In Spring
SELINA SEN
The story of an immigrant Bengali family in Delhi during the time of the anti-Sikh riots of the eighties. It brings out the strength of women in the face of adversity.
Hardback | 140 x 216mm (5.5 x 8.5") | 316 pp
ISBN 8186939334
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It is 1984, a year which marks the end of an era in New Delhi, when the city simmers with ethnic strife during the anti-Sikh riots. This cataclysmic event as the backdrop to the story serves to emphasise the climate of change and traces the difference between two very diverse refugee cultures in Delhi; the first one created during the partition of India when the largest migration in history took place. The novel begins with the contrast between two sisters in an immigrant Bengali family. Chhobi, the elder, sensitive and intelligent, is forever trying to rein in the beautiful, narcissistic Sonali, while Ma, their mother, struggles with her loneliness after being widowed in her thirties. Dida is their feisty grandmother whose indomitable spirit prods the family on during times of adversity; and Dadu, their grandfather, is a man perpetually homesick for his estates, irretrievably lost as borders are redrawn to form Bangladesh. Sonny—rich, handsome and arrogant—enters Sonali’s life, only to jilt her. Sonali’s thwarted love affair, and a maritime misadventure, are the catalysts that alter the predictable pattern of the Bengali family’s life and propels its women to find within themselves hitherto unknown strengths—and to evolve and deal with changed circumstances. A Mirror Greens in Spring interweaves the issues of identity and displacement into a distinct motif and traces the gradual erosion of old values, an acceptance of new identities and, for the grandfather, at last a sense of realisation that Delhi is home.
About the author
Selina Sen was educated in Simla and the Delhi University, where she studied economics. She was inspired to write this, her first novel, based on her mother’s reminiscences of her ancestral home lost upon Partition in present-day Bangladesh. Selina has contributed features and travel writing to most of India’s leading newspapers. Until recently, she was the North Indian correspondent for the Hong Kong based Publisher’s Representatives Ltd, a group of magazines on Asian economic affairs. She is very widely travelled, being especially keen on river journeys. She has explored rivers as far-flung as the Orinoco in Venezuela, the Jhelum in Kashmir, the Ganges, the Teesta in North Bengal, the Rhine and the Seine. Her other chief interest is garden design and she maintains a prize-winning water garden at her home in a New Delhi suburb where she lives with her son. She is at present working on her second novel, set in New Delhi and Kashmir.
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