by Jaspreet Singh (Bloomsbury, ISBN 9781408829165)
The fulcrum of Jaspreet Singh’s fine novel is the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984. Raj Kumar, at the time a chemistry student, is a horrified witness to the barbaric reprisal killing of Professor Singh, his university professor and mentor. Twenty-five years later, by now a lecturer at Cornell University with children and a failing marriage, Raj returns to India to visit his invalid father, a retired senior police officer. Almost on a whim, he takes the train north to Shimla to seek out Nelly, the widow of his teacher. He finds her working as an archivist, painstakingly cataloguing the country’s colonial and post-colonial history. Raj and Nelly had briefly been lovers decades before and, as they tentatively re-establish their relationship, Raj is forced to confront agonizing truths about his family’s role in the pogroms against the Sikh population unleashed by Gandhi’s killing.
