Great Secret Read!

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.