Flitting in the Shadows

Husna is only four when she leaves India for America with her foster mother. Growing up in Chicago she is obsessed with the absence of her foster father and her mother and grandmother’s continued silences about him.

Then one terrible day, nearly two decades after she has come to America, her mother and grandmother meet with a freak road accident leaving her alone, consoled by her boyfriend Adam.

On the discovery of a hidden manuscript in her mother’s cupboard, she and Adam are swept into a family saga which starts at the partition of undivided India and leads into the story of Arvind and the horror and loneliness of his secret of being sexually abused by his uncles from the age of six till his early teens. His early life is also emotionally scarred by an extremely cold and autocratic father who rules his family through suppression and fear.

Into adolescence and adulthood Arvind struggles with his ambivalent sexuality in college and management school till he finds love and marriage with Sushmita a bohemian and rebel who has her own resentments against her mother. As time passes he loses his way in his struggles with his suppressed nature fueled by the demons of his childhood. On discovery by Sushmita he loses her and his adopted daughter.

Husna finishes the manuscript shaken to the core.

She realizes that this is the story of her foster father. She then embarks on an epic odyssey which takes her through India and through Arvind’s past.

Does Husna find what she has lacked for most of her life? Does she find it within herself to finally forgive? Does love finally triumph?