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Secret Daughter: A Novel, by Shilpi Somaya Gowda
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“Moving and thought-provoking and informative and imaginative and beautifully executed. What a wonderful story!”
—Mary Jane Clark
“This book is a must for anyone touched by adoption, or India, or the delicate dynamic between adolescent girls and their mothers.”
—Sujata Massey, author of Shimura Trouble
Secret Daughter, a first novel by Shilpi Somaya Gowda, explores powerfully and poignantly the emotional terrain of motherhood, loss, identity, and love through the experiences of two families—one Indian, one American—and the child that binds them together. A masterful work set partially in the Mumbai slums so vividly portrayed in the hit film Slumdog Millionaire, Secret Daughter recalls the acclaimed novels of Kim Edwards and Thrity Umrigar, yet sparkles with the freshness of a truly exciting new literary voice.
- Sales Rank: #14437 in eBooks
- Published on: 2010-02-20
- Released on: 2010-03-09
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Publishers Weekly
Gowda's debut novel opens in a small Indian village with a young woman giving birth to a baby girl. The father intends to kill the baby (the fate of her sister born before her) but the mother, Kavita, has her spirited away to a Mumbai orphanage. Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Somer, a doctor who can't bear children, is persuaded by her Indian husband, Krishnan, to adopt a child from India. Somer reluctantly agrees and they go to India where they coincidentally adopt Kavita's daughter, Asha. Somer is overwhelmed by the unfamiliar country and concerned that the child will only bond with her husband because Asha and Krishnan will look alike, they will have their ancestry in common. Kavita, still mourning her baby girl, gives birth to a son. Asha grows up in California, feeling isolated from her heritage until at college she finds a way to visit her birth country. Gowda's subject matter is compelling, but the shifting points of view weaken the story. (Mar.)
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From Booklist
In her engaging debut, Gowda weaves together two compelling stories. In India in 1984, destitute Kavita secretly carries her newborn daughter to an orphanage, knowing her husband, Jasu, would do away with the baby just as he had with their firstborn daughter. In their social stratum, girls are considered worthless because they can’t perform physical labor, and their dowries are exorbitant. That same year in San Francisco, two doctors, Somer and Krishnan, she from San Diego, he from Bombay, suffer their second miscarriage and consider adoption. They adopt Asha, a 10-month-old Indian girl from a Bombay orphanage. Yes, it’s Kavita’s daughter. In alternating chapters, Gowda traces Asha’s life in America—her struggle being a minority, despite living a charmed life, and Kavita and Jasu’s hardships, including several years spent in Dharavi, Bombay’s (now Mumbai’s) infamous slum, and the realization that their son has turned to drugs. Gowda writes with compassion and uncanny perception from the points of view of Kavita, Somer, and Asha, while portraying the vibrant traditions, sights, and sounds of modern India. --Deborah Donovan
Review
This wise debut moves deftly between the child’s two mothers and cultures.
Most helpful customer reviews
196 of 199 people found the following review helpful.
Moving and satisfying, great debut...
By Denise Crawford
This beautifully written book, Secret Daughter: A Novel, is one that will linger in my thoughts for a long time. It's a poignant story about family -- just who is "family" and what it means to be a part of one. It's also a brilliantly written testimony to mothers everywhere, for "if the mother falls, the whole family falls."
Asha (Hope) was secretly named Usha (Dawn) by her birth mother, Kavita, and is adopted from an Indian orphanage by a married American couple when she is just a year old. Kavita, already grieving the infanticide of a previous daughter in a society that prefers male infants, had made the long journey to Shanti to deliver her 3-day-old child there for safety so that her husband and his family would not also destroy this second unwanted female child. She left her daughter with only a thin silver bracelet and a wish that Asha be allowed to live, grow up, and perhaps have a better life.
Somer and Krishnan Thakkar, both doctors -- she's a pediatrician and he's a neurosurgeon -- have been unable to have a child. He is Indian and came to America to attend medical school and stayed for a better life. She married him without fully appreciating the Indian heritage and his connection to the land of his birth and to the family and traditions he left behind there. When they adopt Asha and bring her back to America to raise, little do they realize that their new beloved daughter will one day defy her parents and seek to restore their connection to their Indian relatives despite the fact that she may hurt them when she begins to trace her birth parents to find out who she is and why they gave her up for adoption.
The story moves forward in time from 1984 to 2009, and is told from the viewpoints of the three main females of the story - Somer, Kavita, and Asha. All are women who have a very strong feeling about motherhood -- and about their own mothers. In addition, each woman sees a different India and comes to appreciate the country in different ways even as they realize that "Mother India does not love all her children equally."
The story of each woman's journey to epiphany and self-realization is very moving and satisfying. I highly recommend this book.
45 of 47 people found the following review helpful.
An extraordinary debut novel from a Canadian author!
By Paul Weiss
SECRET DAUGHTER tells two heartbreaking stories, worlds apart but inseparably linked. The first is about infertility in North American woman and the extreme lengths that some hopeful mothers- and fathers-to-be will take to achieve the elusive goal of parenthood. The second graphically illustrates the demeaning treatment of women and girls in India combined with the overpowering social pressure that Indian women feel to bear sons. A common beginning breaks into two tales and then finds common ground once again at the conclusion of Shilpi Somaya Gowda's brilliant debut novel.
Kavita Merchant, having had her first child heartlessly ripped away from her and simply "disposed of" in the manner of an unwanted chattel, defies her family, her husband and her culture's social mores to spirit her second child, Usha, into an orphanage. All that Kavita can bequeath to her daughter is a small silver bangle and life itself. Separated by two oceans, thousands of miles and an entire universe of cultural differences, Somer and Krishnan Thakkar, both successful doctors in North America are struggling with Somer's inability to conceive and carry a baby to full term. All attempts at producing their own child having failed, they reluctantly decide, in homage to Krishnan's ethnicity and his family, to adopt an Indian child from an orphanage in Mumbai. SECRET DAUGHTER is the story of two families and the life of the daughter who was given the gift of a chance at a life that nobody but her mother wanted her to have.
Although Gowda's concerns and dismay over the Indian culture's preferential treatment for sons is clear enough, she does not (thankfully) indulge in heavy-handed proselytizing or hand-wringing. The story is quite shocking, compelling, absorbing and heartbreaking enough even when it is told in a relatively factual, straightforward, almost banal manner. Indeed, the effect on North American sensibilities may be more powerful and poignant for Gowda's presentation of the practice of killing unwanted daughters as simply the way it is. I'll confess to my western confusion over the matriarchs of Indian families who seem to have the bizarre ability to forget or ignore the fact that, at one point in their lives, they too were baby girls who were probably, at best, unwelcome additions to their families.
Some readers will almost certainly be disappointed at the lack of closure that the finale of the story brings to all of its characters. For my money, this open-ended conclusion keeps SECRET DAUGHTER out of the potentiall pitfall of becoming trite or sappy. Life, after all, goes on. Families and cultures are dynamic, evolving things and, as individuals, our life on this earth is all too short. Our individual contributions are only a small part of that development. If we can all agree that the murder of infant Indian girls is unacceptable in a modern world whether it is in India or North America, then I think we can also agree that Shilpi Somaya Gowda, the novel SECRET DAUGHTER and the story of little Usha's life, has made a notable contribution toward that change.
Highly recommended.
Paul Weiss
97 of 110 people found the following review helpful.
Gaps in the story
By Mamochka
I agree with the reviewer who wrote "Good Plot, Weak Characters." The idea of following two families who do not know they are connected, one who places a child for adoption because she is a girl, and one who lives halfway around the world who adopts the girl, is wonderful. Ann Hood did this to some extent in "The Red Thread," but she did not follow the Chinese mothers for the rest of their lives, as Shilpa Gowda follows Kavita. Kavita is married to Jasu, who had their first-born daughter killed. They can only afford one child, and he will do anything for a son. When Kavita produces yet another girl child, she runs away from her small village to an orphanage in Mumbai, to leave the wrong-gendered infant and spare her the fate of her older sister. Meanwhile, we meet Somer (American, Caucasian, Protestant) and Krishnan (Indian, Hindu), a young married couple living in California whose efforts to give birth have produced nothing but grief. They travel to India to adopt the little girl that Kavita placed in the orphanage, whom they call Asha (Hope).
(What comes below talks about more of the plot than you may want to know if you plan to read the book.)
It is not clear what attracts Somer and Krishnan to each other in the first place; perhaps Somer is drawn in by the exotic, foreign Krishnan, so different than anything else in her otherwise plain vanilla life. Somer has little if any interest in Krishnan's culture, so unless Krishnan is trying to escape all memories of India (and there is nothing that indicates this), it is hard to see what attracts him to Somer (yes she is bright and attractive, but can someone really love another person who has no interest in his native land/culture?). The adoption and raising of Asha hold this couple together, but when Asha leaves the nest for college and a fellowship in India, the cracks in the marriage show all too clearly.
Meanwhile, Kavita gives birth to the long-dreamed of son, Vijoy (Victory). The family's move from village to city (Mumbai, naturally) proves economically sound, but plays havoc with the traditional family bonds, as Vijoy is influenced more by friends than family, and grows up to be a drug dealer. Why his parents take his ill-gotten money when they know what he is doing is not clear to me, as Kavita is portrayed as a long-suffering saint and Jasu slowly reveals that, despite having his first child killed, he has (almost) a heart of gold.
Growing up, Asha has shown some curiousity about her birth family and birth culture This section of the book needs considerably more substance if we are to believe that Asha travels to India to stay with her father's relatives whom she does not know and winds up wholeheartedly embracing the family (and vica versa) and the culture, and of course, finding love (while writing prize-winning articles to boot). She also searches for her birth family, which is totally believable, but the resolution is wishy-washy.
One gaping omission is the role of the caste system in the life of Indian society. Does caste really play NO role in this story? How can that possibly be? Why is it never mentioned when it is so important in Hindu India? Would all of Krishnan's family truly embrace this adopted child, most likely from a lower caste than they? Would Asha really be given such an honored role at her grandfather's funeral? Is the author saying that caste is meaningless in India, or does she just wish that were true?
This could have been a very compelling story about cross-cultural and transracial adoption if it had examined more thoroughly and realistically each member of the adoption triad and the cultures that they came from.
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