New Delhi, Nov 3 (PTI) Author and oral historian Aanchal Malhotra will tell a love story set around the 1947 Partition in her debut novel to be published next month.
Told against a backdrop of tumultuous historical events, “The Book of Everlasting Things” is billed as an exquisite tale of love, loss, memory, and place.
The novel is about two families – one of perfumers and the other of calligraphers – entwined in each others’ lives for nearly a century by way of friendship, artistry, memory, war, betrayal, guilt, longing, exile, and above all, love, says Malhotra.
Navigating battlefields and flower fields, olfactory and amorous impulses, it is a book guided by the senses, she says.
“The Book of Everlasting Things” will be published in India and the US simultaneously on December 27 by HarperCollins.
“Since the spring of 2017, this novel has consumed me; its characters often feeling more real than reality itself, its landscape built from borrowed, researched, and dreamt up terrains,” Malhotra says.
According to Udayan Mitra, executive publisher at HarperCollins India, the book is the “story of many things, as life itself is: it is a story of love, longing and separation; of family, loyalty, fate; of war, exile and art”.
“But I would say, more than anything else, it is a book about memories – how they are made, how they live on, and are transformed over time,” he adds.
Mitra believes the scope and span of the novel is ambitious and epic – it is a powerful and engaging saga that builds on the fascinating history of modern South Asia.
Drawn by an intoxicating smell, Samir Vij first locks eyes with Firdaus Khan through the rows of perfume bottles in his family’s ‘ittar’ shop in Lahore’s Anarkali Bazaar. Over the years that follow, the perfumer and the illuminator of manuscripts fall in love, their story written in dark and delicate ink.
However, with the Partition and the birth of two independent nations, Samir, a Hindu, becomes Indian and Firdaus, a Muslim, becomes Pakistani. Bound by family and fate, torn between duty and desire, the two lovers move farther away from one other.
Malhotra, who is also the co-founder of the Museum of Material Memory, has authored the critically-acclaimed books “Remnants of a Separation” and “In the Language of Remembering” that explore the human history and generational impact of the Partition. PTI ZMN RDS RDS
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Source: The Print
