Written Word

Sexually abused as a young girl in a society that rendered children without a voice, Jawahara Saidullah drifted through life, certain the trauma she’d suffered as a child meant she wasn’t worthy to take part in living. Through her identification of India’s warrior queens, Jawahara eventually found the strength to face her trauma. Like these historical women who saved their thrones, lineage, and countries in male-dominated societies that considered them too weak to rule, Jawahara’s lifelong connection to her country’s warrior queens inspired a determination to succeed that became the foundation of strength she fought to pass along to her adopted daughter.

In 1976, a 17-year-old's gangrape is hushed up. Aastha is forced to marry her rapist. The ripples of that traumatic night flow across decades, connecting the lives of many people in the town of Allahabad. Nearly 30 years later, Aastha struggles to come to terms with a life full of bitterness, emotional solitude, and compromises. The rape which made her cold to her son Prayag; and the secrecy and shame that kept his mother distant. In an attempt at redemption, Aastha tries to help Reshma, an impoverished young woman, inadvertently thrusting Reshma on the path of mortal danger. Aastha’s unwillingness to expose the past puts Prayag in the path of danger as well. The lives of Aastha, Prayag, Reshma, the four rapists, and those around them all fracture and intersect across social, economic, political, and religious lines. As the roots of hatred, love, and the meaning of family get brutally exposed by a religious riot, Aastha’s determination to finally make her own choices and reveal longheld secrets may hold the keys to life, death, reconciliation, and redemption. Where the Rivers Meet explores women’s agency and sisterhood. It dissects the nature of families across the barriers of class, religion and community.

In 16th century India, when Nadee is swept away by the raging Yamuna, her life itself becomes a journey. A journey that takes her from her devastated village, Zameerpur, to the burning ghats of Kashi, to the courts of Agra and then on to the city of dreams, Fatehpur-Sikri. Even as her life intertwines with history, barriers between the future and the past, the dead and the living break down until they become indistinguishable. In Akbar's Hindustan, Nadee is the eternal wanderer and soothsayer. She is doomed to love Kashi's unattainable king of the dead, the Dom Raja, to serve the legendary courtesan, Chhappan Chhoori and then the almost mythical emperor, Akbar. When her newborn son, the legacy of her love, disappears she slides further into madness and despair as she searches desperately for her one link to herself. Nadee is blindingly aware of her destiny, though she remains powerless to change it. The Burden of Foreknowledge is a story that traces an unusual life, a life that brushes against greatness but remains inexorably trained towards its own ultimate fate. As the boundaries between reality and fantasy collide, the story reaches its climactic conclusion in the abandoned and desolate city of dreams, when Nadee finally achieves what has been predestined.