Review: Secret Daughter, by Shilpi Somaya Gowda

Shilpi Gowda's first novel, Secret Daughter, is the beautiful, interwoven tale of two sides of international adoption.

Kavita, a poor Indian woman from a small rural village, gives birth in a hut at dawn with the knowledge that if this child is again a girl, it will suffer the same horrible fate at the hands of her husband, who looks only for a son, as her last child. Hours later, Kavita, her sari bloodied from her fresh birthing wounds, travels on the back of a trader's cart to distant Bombay to leave her daughter, with only a name and a small silver anklet, in the arms of an orphanage director. Thousands of miles away, Somer, an American doctor, has just suffered her third miscarriage. A year later, their lives are inextricably linked when Somer and her husband, an Indian-born doctor, adopt Kavita's baby.

Over the next twenty years, Secret Daughter is told from several points of view. At first, Kavita and Somer are the primary focus, but as daughter Asha grows into a young girl, her voice is included as well. Others, such as Somer's husband and her mother-in-law, make only a few appearances, as does Kavita's husband, but this makes them no less important; one chapter told by Jasu was, for me, the most emotionally devastating in the novel. The entire tale is at once heartbreaking and stirring, with the current of loss flowing throughout; Kavita never recovers from the loss of her two girls, while Somer struggles with feelings of inadequacy brought on by her infertility and a sense of being the outsider in her own small family, her husband's family, and the entire culture they represent. Asha struggles with the loss of her birth parents and country, and Sarla, Somer's mother-in-law, deals with the loss of her son to a foreign wife and country. All the characters suffer in silence, much to the detriment of everyone involved, and it is only when all the hurt is allowed to reach the surface that each character can let go of the past and embrace a joint future.

Gowda delves deeply into the issues of love and cross-culturalism, revealing raw truths about the difficulty of attempting to mesh different ideals and expectations. For the most part, this is done exceptionally well. The characters are believable and easy to attach to, Kavita in particular. Her agony is palpable, and over the years as her thoughts return again and again to the child she left behind the reader can feel her pain radiating out of the novel. Somer's insecurities, and Asha's yearning for the nearly unknowable about her past also reach out beyond the pages, but in a slightly flatter way. The resolution between Somer and Sarla is a bit too easy and predictable, but this is made up for by a final chapter with Jasu that simply bores its way into the soul. The novel ends with where it begins, in a beautiful revolution that binds all the characters into eternity.

Rating: Five stars. A lovely, deeply emotional work that stirs the imagination and soul.