Book Review #25: Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, Daisy Rockwell (Translator)

I am blank, lost in no space and yet have piles of thoughts. I want to bow down to The Legend - Geetanjali Shree for creating a masterpiece and bringing to this world, where readers are dying to encounter an unusual art, and writers are still fantasizing to carve out more and more.

This book consists of everything. It’s a bible of human, their emotions, their traumas, their livelihood, their ideas on logistic politics and countries, their actions on societal norms, their intuitions on boundaries of families and land, their changing constants of age factors, their last wishes, their colonial urge to survive and their inhuman tendency to become human.

This piece of work is assorted in three platonic parts. Parts where nothing makes sense, but at the end, you will regret why this ended so soon. 

In the first section of narration, the author has described the simplest bitter-sweet form of chaos among many faces of one family. Amma, the superstar of this tale, was depressed because she lost her partner. She was so depressed, that popping out of her comfort became the utmost responsibility of all creatures around - son, daughter, daughter-in-law, grand-children, maids, gardener, newspaper wala, cook, ants, crows, unauthorized gifts, strangers, relatives, forgotten friends, ultra sweet colleagues, memories, sun rays, window with a view, superstitions, religious ceremonies, man-dominated decisions, uncalled family fights and so on. In that power pact performances of all the species, the exact justice of wordplay and overthinking had been ravishingly done. 

Later on in the second section, the sensational personality just went missing. The one who was not at all able to stand on her own, now ran away somewhere. The quest to find her took effect like a spark, but the actual effort was irrelevant. Because Amma was not lost, but was on the path of finding herself. When she came back, her protection measures were doubled. And this time, her daughter became in-charge. This second season consisted of a mother-daughter relationship. The kind of comfort one finds in others, how the old age resembled child-like behaviors, how guardianship swapped between the two entities, everything was elaborate in empathetic ways, and yet served on a humorous platter. And apart from this, an unknown friendship beyond gender and experiences also got hatched with Rosie. Rosie became a human diary for Amma.

You will not even realize when you slip into the last section of this adventure, where borders create history. So moving on, now Amma was recovering well but suddenly Rosie went missing. And this created a mess all around. Amma decided to go to Pakistan to find Rosie’s memories through her eyes. The cinematic description of Wagah Border had showcased a major blind spot across boundaries of neighboring countries. Honestly, the description of Pakistan’s land made my traveler's soul restless for a while. Even beyond the borders, nothing was unfamiliar. But the authorities made everything separated. Amma initially went in search of something else, but eventually revealed a shocking pastime story of love. What happened to Amma? I will not spoil anything more, and beg you to read for once in your lifetime. 

I am still in awe of the author's superior skills of penning down all the possible imaginations. And I must say, no one could have done justice to the translated version by Daisy Rockwell.

Please go and read this book. Please understand the essence of literature in finding all the answers to the world's theories. Please deep dive to the infinite briefs covered by Geetanjali, intentionally or unintentionally.