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The years haven’t taken away the pain, probably just numbed it. Take a walk down memory lane and the images keep coming back...sooner or later. In a subtle and sombre tone, Manreet Sodhi Someshwar narrates the trials and tirbulations of the insurgency in Punjab, tracing it all back to Partition, unfolding many layers that have never come to fore. Deep, but not dark, is the beauty of the novel, where yesterday, today and tomorrow present various perspectives and the book documents history through fiction. As Gulzar put it aptly after reading it, ‘A narrative of pain knows no borders’, The Long Walk Home is a homecoming for Sodhi, with traces of her life, the protagonist, advocate Harbaksh Singh Bhalla, bears a resemblance to her father, “the book is dedicated to him,’’ Manreet was here at Browser for the launch of the book, which has been published by Harper Collins.
Set in Ferozepur, where Manreet was born and brought up, the author says the Khalistan movement and the ‘84 riots had an acute impression on her, as her father was a lawyer and many people would come to him during the period of insurgency. “He would never expose us to what he heard and dealt with, but the violence, the impact on people, the state, affected us,’’ Manreet, now a book critic for the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong, studied at PEC and IIM, Kolkata, with a long career in the corporate world. It was a sabbatical from work, that made Manreet start this novel, which took her seven years to write...”In the meanwhile my novel ‘Earning the Laundry Stripes,’ was released in 2006 and it gave me the distance I needed to complete this one,’’ Manreet says that Sikh militancy had not been written about as a form of fiction and she realized that to tell the story in depth, she would have to go back to the pre-independence era, through Partition, the Green revolution, the not-so-secular Punjab...What makes the novel absorbing is the fact that history is traced through the life of Harbaksh Singh Bhalla, who lives in a border town in Punjab. “He’s a secular Punjabi and it’s his transition along with that of Punjab, that the reader will experience,’’ the novel moves back and forth in time, with Baksh’s death forming the first thread, the second being his family at the funeral, trying to piece together Baksh’s life. “For as long as three hours, Baksh walks through the town with chest pain, searching for a doctor and grappling for answers, for long back he’s made an error of judgement,’’ Manreet’s characters explore various perspectives of faith, fundamentalism and life. There’s an intricate blend of research and feelings, and Manreet says through her writing, she understands what makes her a Punjabi. Both Gulzar and Khushwant Singh appreciated ‘The Long Walk Home’, “that’s such a huge and heartening compliment,’’ Manreet is now challenging herself with a literary thriller and loves her role as a full-time writer!
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