In the spirit of Khaled Hosseini, Nadia Hashimi and Shilpi Somaya Gowda
comes this powerful debut from a talented new voice--a sweeping,
emotional journey of two childhood friends in Mumbai, India, whose lives
converge only to change forever one fateful night.
India, 1986: Mukta, a ten-year-old village girl from the lower caste
Yellama cult has come of age and must fulfill her destiny of becoming a
temple prostitute, as her mother and grandmother did before her. In an
attempt to escape her fate, Mukta is sent to be a house girl for an
upper-middle class family in Mumbai. There she discovers a friend in the
daughter of the family, high spirited eight-year-old Tara, who helps her
recover from the wounds of her past. Tara introduces Mukta to an
entirely different world--one of ice cream, reading, and a friendship
that soon becomes a sisterhood.
But one night in 1993, Mukta is kidnapped from Tara's family home and
disappears. Shortly thereafter, Tara and her father move to America. A
new life in Los Angeles awaits them but Tara never recovers from the
loss of her best friend, or stops wondering if she was somehow
responsible for Mukta's abduction.
Eleven years later, Tara, now an adult, returns to India determined to
find Mukta. As her search takes her into the brutal underground world of
human trafficking, Tara begins to uncover long-buried secrets in her own
family that might explain what happened to Mukta--and why she came to
live with Tara's family in the first place.
Moving from a traditional Indian village to the bustling modern
metropolis of Mumbai, to Los Angeles and back again, this is a
heartbreaking and beautiful portrait of an unlikely friendship--a story
of love, betrayal, and, ultimately, redemption.
