THE STORY I TOLD MYSELF

In Seeripat’s novel, a desperate Indian woman on the run with her two small children pays a steep price to keep her family safe from the horrors of indentured servitude.

It’s the late 1800s, and the only chance that Shivali Tewari and her family have at survival lies far away on a South African sugar cane plantation in Port Natal (now Durban), where they hope to find work as laborers. Fleeing the misogyny of her native Indian village of Ishapur, Shivali lives only to protect her daughter, Uma, and son, Hari. Although she’s plagued by guilt after killing her violent husband, Shivali will kill again if she must. For weeks, the family bears the oppressive confinement of the holding yard, waiting for the S.S.Umzimkulu to finally fulfill its quota of cheap human labor and set sail for the new land. However, the ship is a nightmarish place where “fights among men and the rape of women and men were regular events with consequences that would haunt us forever.” Themes of brutality are contrasted with those of familial love and kindness throughout Seeripat’s often moving saga. Shivali, Uma, Hari, and newly adopted members of their ragtag family are sent to Thompson’s Farm upon arrival in Port Natal, and they spend the next 10 years attempting to pursue lives of meaning and purpose under the yoke of institutionalized racism and colonial degradation. Seeripat is especially effective at relating the family’s grim odyssey by alternating between the first-person perspectives of Shivali, Uma, and Hari; at one point, for instance, Uma reminds readers, “The English didn’t really want women on the plantations. They were scared we would have babies and then there would be more Brown people than white ones in Natal. Imagine the horror of Brown people taking over!” Shivali’s inner turmoil is truly heartbreaking, and Uma’s unlikely romance with the plantation owner’s son, Richard, is rendered with all the beauty and ugliness that their world has to offer.

A deeply emotional story about the Indian diaspora.