What the Body Remembers - Tapa blanda

It's 1937, and with her father in debt, motherless sixteen-year-old Roop learns she is to become the second wife of Sardarji, a wealthy Sikh landowner whose first wife, Satya, has failed to bear him a child. Roop believes that the strong-willed Satya will treat her as a sister, but their relationship swiftly becomes ominous and complicated. What the Body Remembers is also Satya's story. Mortified when Sardarji marries Roop, Satya resorts to desperate measures to maintain her place in society and her husband's heart. Sardarji himself struggles as the India he knows begins to change when separatist tensions between Hindus and Muslims trap the Sikhs in a horrifying middle ground and the departing British prepare to divide the land into India and Pakistan.

Shauna Singh Baldwin was born in Montreal and grew up in India. She is the author of English Lessons and Other Stories and the co-author of A Foreign Visitor's Survival Guide to America. Her short stories have been published widely and have won numerous prestigious literary awards in the US, Canada and India. The story that was to become What the Body Remembers was awarded the Saturday Night/CBC Literary Prize. What the Body Remembers is the recipient of the Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2000 for Best Book in Canada and the Caribbean. She lives in Milwaukee.