Publishing is awash in barely distinguishable novels featuring characters who have unhealthy relationships with their phones. Asha Thanki, to her credit, can’t be accused of contributing to this surplus. Her characters have more important things to do than search stranger’s Instagram feeds.
Thanki’s first book, “A Thousand Times Before,” is a sweeping, emotionally powerful tale set against a backdrop of geopolitical strife, a novel about nothing less than self-determination, national identity and ancestral traumas.
The story, which plays out in South Asia, Minneapolis and New York, features three generations of women whose preternatural creative talents inspire political change and incite unanticipated tragedy. To those who’d try to categorize this book, best of luck. Is it ambitious historical fiction? A precisely crafted character study? A disarming work of magical realism?
Yes.
Thanki, who earned a master’s in creative writing at the University of Minnesota, builds her plot around an ingenious conceit — a family heirloom with seemingly supernatural qualities — that serves as a metaphor for the burdens so often placed on women.
The story starts in 1946 in India, where tensions are high before the departure of British colonial troops and the redrawing of borders. Under Partition, as it’s called, part of India will become the new, mostly Muslim country of Pakistan.
Among the millions uprooted in the process is 10-year-old Amla, whose family moves to Gujarat, a state that remains part of predominantly Hindu India. As hundreds of thousands die in sectarian violence, Amla suffers two deeply personal losses — the death of her mother and the end of her close friendship with Fiza, a Muslim girl who will live in Pakistan.
Longing to be reunited with Fiza, Amla finds solace in a tapestry owned by her mother Chandini. The tapestry’s “reds and mustards and greens emphasiz[e] row after row of women marching,” Thanki writes. Just before her death, Chandini wove a new image into the cloth, “a girl older than a toddler and younger than a bride”: Amla.
The tapestry, it emerges, is not just decorative. To have one’s image woven into the fabric is to receive the astonishing, and difficult to harness, artistic gifts possessed by women in Amla’s family. Amla and her daughter Arni can, in effect, will ideas into reality with a few brushstrokes — bad news for the sexual predators and corrupt politicos they depict in paintings and murals. But like a mythic superpower, it’s a gift with harrowing byproducts; those who receive it inherit trauma experienced by their ancestors.
The story’s narrator is Arni’s daughter Ayukta, a Brooklyn-based sculptor who returns to her parents’ Minneapolis house after a death in the family. Like the women before her, Arni had woven her daughter’s image into the tapestry. As a result, Ayukta tells her wife Nadya, “I am constantly carrying grief in my memory.”
Nadya wants children, but Ayukta isn’t sure. Would Ayukta be obligated to weave a daughter into the tapestry? It’s a subplot that foregrounds how Ayukta’s plight, at its core, isn’t uncommon. She wants to be understood but fears she won’t “be believed — that what I’m saying is too unfathomable.” As depicted in this absorbing novel, it’s a feeling many people will understand.
Kevin Canfield is a regular contributor to the Star Tribune’s books coverage.
A Thousand Times Before
By: Asha Thanki.
Publisher: Viking, 358 pages, $29.
