What We Carry: A Memoir

Author: Maya Shanbhag Lang

Genre: Memoir

Rating: 4 out of 5

Pages: 288

Date Started: 28 December 2021

Date Finished: 30 December 2021

I have no specific memory of choosing this book to read. The book was available on Kindle from the library and was easier to carry while I traveled. I have not read many memoirs and thought it was a good chance for me. I did not know about the subject as well!

Maya, who has given birth to a baby girl, Zoe starts her story about her mother, and her relationship with her mother while growing up. Maya is fascinated by the courage, resilience, and thoughtful attitude of her mother and thinks she is perfect. Maya continues to talk about her mother being diagnosed with dementia and becomes the full-time caregiver for her mother.

The struggles of being a new mother, postpartum depression, exhaustion, and the attitude of her mother towards the situation make the author seek help, and she explains well about her struggles and triumphs. The book is mostly about the struggles Maya suffers as a caregiver to her mother who is losing herself to the disease. The caregivers' guilt, problems, and making a life around the disease and the patient is explained well.

Having a personal experience with a close relative who suffered from 'Parkinson's induced Dementia', was not only hard but heartbreaking at the same time. The struggles of managing the tantrums, fears, and stubbornness were not easy to read. The mother accusing her own kids of scamming her and treating her like a slave is not unusual, but also disheartening. But at the same time, I felt that the author sounded like she wanted the credit for taking care of her mother. She justifies the suffering she and her family took while caring for her mother, which was totally optional if she had chosen to admit her mother to the senior care center. Hence 4 stars instead of 5!

Favorite lines from the book:

• Noah's family never expected him to put himself through law school or move to New York City. My Indian parents never imagined that it was acceptable to read books all day. We had proved them wrong.

• I learned that pharmaceutical companies often put x and z in product names (Xanax, Zoloft, Prozac) because it makes them more memorable.

• I learned that people's insides were more complicated than their outsides revealed.

• I longed for an arsenal of beauty products. I didn't want to enhance my features. I wanted to escape them entirely.

• She refused to call her birthplace by its new name after it was rechristened Mumbai. It would always be Bombay to her.

• While I recognize that my thoughts are distorted, I can't regain perspective. Then I feel even more worthless. I am trapped in an endless negative loop.

• It is a cruel feature of memory that trauma retains its vividness while love fades to a blur.

• I don't want Zoe going through life thinking that I gave myself up for her. I don't want guilt to be her inheritance.

• Misery shared is misery lessened.

• Her whole life has been about averting disaster. What about pleasure?

• It seems the woman in the river can't choose correctly. Choosing herself, she faces judgment. Sacrificing herself, she faces it, too. That is the real lesson of the story: A woman faces judgment no matter what she chooses. No wonder my mom hid the truth from me. She didn't see that a mother's story affects a daughter's choices.

• Forgiveness has never come easily to me. I have the opposite problem of my mom: a too-sharp memory.

• Alzheimer's is devastating because it annihilates one's story. It vacuums it up. My mom no longer belongs to me. She belongs to her illness.

• All her life, she saved for a rainy day. She was so busy preparing for rain that she never stopped to feel the sun.

• The story is about the woman choosing herself. Once she makes that choice, everything follows.

• My mom recognizes me, I tell them. The problem is that I don't recognize her.

The Color Of Our Sky

Author: Amita Trasi

Genre: Fiction

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Pages: 416

Date Started: 24 December 2021

Date Finished: 27 December 2021

The first reason for me choosing this book was the rating on Goodreads. I was at a used bookstore looking for a book to read over the holidays and couldn't stop myself from buying this after I read the synopsis and the rating. I should also mention that I have been reading quite a few books by Indian authors and most of my books have been by female authors too. The picture of two girls in front of Gateway of India, Mumbai was another reason I picked up this book.

The story starts with Tara, who lives in the United States of America, visiting India to get an update about a case her father filed for a girl who was abducted from their house in Mumbai about 11 years ago. The girl was Mukta, who is a daughter of a devdasi, living with her mother and grandmother Sakubai, in Ganipur, located on the border of Maharashtra and Karnataka. Mukta who is pushed into becoming a prostitute or a temple slave is rescued by Ashok Deshmukh, who is also from the same village, who now lives in Mumbai with his wife Karuna and daughter Tara. Karuna is not happy with Ashok for bringing the low-caste girl into their house, but Tara, who is about a couple of years younger than Mukta, becomes close friends with her.

Tara's mother loses her life in the Mumbai bomb blasts in 1993, and while she is recovering from the death of her mother, Mukta is abducted in the middle of the night, and Tara since then feels guilty of not saving Mukta that night. Later, Ashok decides to move to the USA, and Tara grows up still guilty of not doing much that unfortunate night. The story is narrated from both Mukta and Tara's views and experiences. Mukta is sold into prostitution after abduction and the narration of the lives of prostitutes is heartbreaking.

Tara tries to find Mukta with the help of Raza, who was her childhood friend, and with a couple Dinesh and Saira who also runs an NGO for saving women and children from prostitution and run a center to train the rescued. The story is about the struggles everyone goes through, Tara, Mukta, Ashok, Karuna, Raza, Navin (Tara's neighbor's son), Anupam Chacha (Tara's neighbor, who also hails from the same village as her father Ashok). The struggle to find Mukta continues for more than three years will Tara ever see Mukta and how will their feelings and reactions be if they ever meet have been carried in the books very well till the end.

All the characters involved in the story have their unique part to play. Raza stood out in the entire story for me. Raza, once a local small-time goon, sells drugs and threaten local business to get things his way. He transforms himself into a useful member of society and works to make life better for the women and children pushed into prostitution. Even though Tara had a bad experience with Raza when she was younger, Raza makes sure she trusts her and apologizes to her for his actions.

The book for sure was a roller coaster ride of emotions. The curiosity and mystery starting from page one continue till the end. The story never takes any downturn and all the characters have maintained their importance and dignity. The stories of the women in the red light area are extremely heartbreaking. The story of Tara's perspective also shows that one can be guilty and can also make things right. The story of Mukta shows to accept life as it comes, and yet not stop dreaming and hoping. Overall, I felt that things do work out in life, but it is our expectation that makes our lives miserable and brings sadness.

Favorite lines from the book:

• Coming from a long line of devdasis, I was bound to become one eventually. But as a child, I did not know that.

• Sometimes I forget I was a child once.

• I wasn't allowed to enter the house. I was to sit in the backyard on the cold, concrete slab that would become my bed for the night. I'd eat my food there, and sleep there. It was a ritual I never questioned. I didn't know any better.

• When we die, we become stars in the sky so we can water over the ones we love.

• When I was young, I took too many liberties with my ideas of freedom and tried to create a revolution in the village. Now I think there are more peaceful ways of making people understand. I still very much wish though, that people would open their eyes and understand that humanity is more important than caste or even religion. And every human being has rights; treating others badly is a sin.

• Once I even asked her, "What do you get from those books, anyway?" She closed the book she was reading, thought for a while, and said "It is better than the world we live in."

• You could travel the world but never be able to see it the way she could describe it to you.

• The only way we can rectify our mistakes is to try to undo the wrong we have done.

• What we didn't recognize then is that death doesn't just bring with it stifling grief; it changes us in more than ways than one.

• Tara, sometimes we have to find a new life, a new dream, especially when the old ones don't work out.

• "I am a devdasi, a temple slave. This is what I was meant to do." I didn't have to explain. They understood. Each one of us had a similar wound, similar grief, a similar hope of rising in our hearts.

• Hope is like a bird. It wants to keep soaring; no matter how much you want to tie it down.

• Sylvie was the only one brave enough to be there; she understood how painful it was to be all alone. I wish I could have told her that the comfort of her presence was what I would remember the most.

• Those were the good days when all I was worried about was one meal day.

• It was only now that I understood the threads of life don't always weave the way we want them to; sometimes the pattern at the end of our lives is different than what we imagined it would be.