Secret Daughter by Shilpi Somaya Gowda
A story so rich in culture and so real
in experience, Secret Daughter is a
tale tightly woven with such absorbing emotions that you cannot help but feel your
heartstrings tug in the direction of Gowda’s characters. Shilpi Somaya Gowda’s writing flourishes in
her first novel, both through her literary voice and capturing of human emotion. Secret
Daughter takes place over a 25-year period and gives a voice to two couples
from two different cultures: India and California. Both couples are struggling with their own maternal
issues– one mother is forced to give up her baby girl for fear her husband will
again dismiss it because it was not a boy –the second, a successful doctor
desperate to become a mother, tries to conceive a child with her Indian husband,
but ultimately is told she is infertile.
Despite the hardships, raw feelings and jet lag from India to the United
States, these two sets of parents do what they can with the resources they have
to survive their adversities. At the
very heart of Gowda’s novel are two children, one a boy who grows up in India
to live a double life so that his parents can escape the slums of Mumbai; the
other his sister, who was born into the Indian culture and then adopted and grows
up in America with many American privileges.
Secret
Daughter introduces many realistic and true family topics that families
often have to face; from the differences in cultures to the age old question of
nature versus nurture, Gowda single handedly layers a novel of pure emotional
satisfaction. Not quite a native Indian
herself, Gowda was born in Toronto to parents who are Mumbai natives. She attended Southern Methodist University in
Dallas, Texas. It is clear through her
writing that while obtaining her education in America Gowda never lost her
Indian roots. Her inspiration to write Secret Daughter came partially from a
class project, but mainly from working at an Indian orphanage. She befriended a young orphaned girl and through
their kinship and the girl’s charming nature, Gowda found the muse for Asha and
the story of a mother’s sacrifice.
Gowda’s westernized childhood and
unique cultural influences developed her insightful perspective of both worlds. These two worlds are what led her to create
two very different women based on her own distinction between her parents’
influences of their native culture, India and her western education and upbringing
in America. For example, Kavita is the
impoverished villager who knows too well what happens to unwanted baby girls
and Somer is the American pediatrician who marries a fellow doctor from India
and longs for a child she cannot have.
Both of these women stem from a mutual beginning, Asha, even though they’re
from two different worlds. Kavita
travels to an orphanage to surrender her baby since her family is too poor to
afford a baby girl; Somer’s infertility leads her and her husband to that
orphanage to adopt a baby. Gowda’s novel
forces two worlds, otherwise foreign to one other, together, melding them into
a story that intimately considers how we all are shaped – be it through fate or
free will, nature or nurture – and how it all comes down to the astonishing
power of a family’s love.
The narrator alternates between
Kavita, Somer, Asha, Krishnan and Jasu. Gowda recreates vividly the sounds, scents and
sights of India she experienced because of parents. She pulls you deeper into a culture that most
only glimpse. With ease she navigates the emotional topography of her parenthood,
loss, identity and love. She defines the
cultural fears a western women faces in India; Somer accosted in a crowded
market and arriving home with questions flooding her mind and heart of whether
or not, since nature has already deemed her childless, she has made a mistake “…Would
she know better what to do with Asha if they shared the same blood? Would Asha respond better to Somer if she
didn’t look so different from everyone she’d known in her short life?”
Wonderfully written, both lyrical and
poetic, it is hard to believe Secret
Daughter is Gowda’s debut novel. Her
fluid storytelling keeps the heavy themes at an easily controlled pace. She doesn’t dive too deeply and never
downplays their importance. Because of Gowda’s tactfulness you feel for each
character, despite their roles in the scheme of the story.
If you haven’t read Secret Daughter, you are truly missing
out on an insightful story that is both rewarding and thought-provoking. You travel between two worlds and cannot help
but feel the pull on your heartstrings.
