Tessa McWatt's breathtaking new novel explores love and endurance in
the face of change and violence, and how people find wholeness and
belonging when their own identities feel shattered.
Northern India, 2009. Four travellers disembark from the Dhauladhar
Express at the Pathankot train station, having arrived in Punjab to
attend a wedding. Yosh, 30, a yoga teacher from Vancouver; Monica, 30,
the bride's cousin from Toronto; Reema, 26, the bride's childhood
friend, a mixed-heritage Londoner in search of her Indianness; and
Jackson, 86, who is returning to India after a long hiatus in Boston,
and who carries with him a small tea canister in which he has placed his
wife Amelia's ashes.
As they gather with other guests at the traditional Indian wedding,
Jackson and Reema develop a reluctant, unlikely friendship that grows
through mutual need and a slowly developing trust, and together with
Yosh and Monica, they embark on a post-wedding journey to the Himalayas,
seeking the perfect place to scatter Amelia's ashes. As they travel
together, secrets are revealed, and each of them is opened up to more
questions than answers.
These intergenerational and intercultural relationships are a meeting of
the past and the future, a reconciliation of past wrongs and a
possibility that the future might be less violent, less selfish, less
segregated. But can it be?
