Welcome to my Sunday Book Review. Today I’m sharing my reviews for two books by Fiza Pathan - Nirmala: The Mud Blossom and the follow-up story of Nirmala’s best friend – Amina: The Silent One. These two short fictional stories read all too well about life for these poor Indian girls existing and struggling to survive as poor girls living in the slums of Mumbai. Nirmala was disposed of at two days old into a dumpster, found and returned to her parents, and the horrible life she endured just because she was born a female. Amina the musical child prodigy had an arranged marriage that turned into a bigger hell than she grew up in. I applaud Pathan for sharing the hardships so many poor Indian women endure under the thumb of patriarchal brutality.
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Blurb:
“I’m a mud blossom, and the mud is my home. I was not born from my mother, but from the dustbin.”
Book Synopsis:
This story is about Nirmala the Mud Blossom, who had the misfortune of being born female in Mumbai. Rejected and thrown into the dustbin when she was just two days old, the child was rescued and returned to her family by the NGOs.
Nirmala is ill-treated by her mother and subject to violence at her hands. She is allowed to continue her studies only because she can coach her younger brothers, as her parents are illiterate. On one occasion her mother brutally beats her when she is caught reading David Copperfield instead of doing the household chores; on another, she is struck for voicing her dreams of becoming a doctor. Loving school and the access it gives her to books she relishes, Nirmala accepts each beating with forbearance.
What will happen to this little mud blossom? Will she fight back or succumb? How can she rid herself of harassment and rise above the stigma she endures?
Nirmala: The Mud Blossom graphically depicts the travails, discrimination, and abuse faced by female children in India from the cradle to the grave.
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My 5 Star Review:
One cannot help but feel the sadness in their hearts for Nirmala, a beautiful Indian girl treated like shit all her life from birth, right through to her life growing up in a family where women were nothing except to nurture and birth males, to her arranged marriage to a man obsessed with having a son at any cost. This poor girl has taken the brunt of what her societal beliefs had doled out on her.
Pathan is an engaging storyteller, bringing this heart-wrenching story to us, demonstrating the horrendous way females are treated in India by taking us into one fictional story that gives us a bird’s eye view of living as a female and the way society and their families treat them. From the time Nirmala was born and thrown into a dustbin and retrieved only by force to her parents, her destiny was a life of hardship. Living in a one-room slum, mud hut, her lot in life was to help educate her younger brothers who had much more value to her parents than she, while being subjected to regular beatings by her mother for any talk related to a future for Nirmala and her desire to become a doctor. Her parents allowed her to graduate grade ten only because they were illiterate and needed Nirmala to help tutor her brothers who would one day be able to provide their parents with dowries in marriage.
The story continues when Nirmala is matched up with a husband, and goes to live with his family in a two-room dwelling. But Nirmala’s husband has great ambitions for a son born, and when she produces three daughters, husband is ready to go beserk until he finds someone who can aid him with ultra sounds and abortions every time after his wife got pregnant and it wasn’t a boy. And after every unsterile abortion Nirmala endured and many beatings from her husband for not producing a son, more beatings followed. Nirmala succumbs and surrenders to what her life has become and loses her desire to fight back.
This short book packs a powerful punch on social injustice and the heinous way females are treated as told by the tender Mud Blossom, Nirmala. A story that will stay with you long after it’s read. I am now compelled to read Pathan’s follow-up book, Amina: The Silent One as Amina was a Muslim musical prodigy childhood friend of Nirmala’s who grew up in the slums down the street from Nirmala, also destined for a brutal life.
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Blurb:
Amina: The Silent One is the story of a musical prodigy born in the slums of Mumbai and her journey into hell. Born to Jaffer and his wife, Amina is their third female child, and they want to get rid of her. But sage advice from a professor of history changes their minds. This is the story about how poverty, sexual debasement, and sexual abuse is meted out to Amina, and how music can sometimes melt a heart of stone. Can Amina overcome the poverty she’s been born into, her second-class status as a woman, and the sexual abuse she is made to withstand? Or will she sink into anonymity? This novella will get under your skin and stay with you for years to come.
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My 5 Star Review:
After reading Pathan’s Nirmala: The Mud Blossom and being introduced to Nirmala’s good friend Amina, I felt compelled to read the story of Amina, the musical prodigy, the little Muslim girl living in the slums of Mumbai. Amina was the third daughter born to Jaffar and his wife, and her lot in life wasn’t looking so good as females didn’t count for much in the culture. The only thing that made Amina happy was playing her flute – just one of the three instruments she had a gift for playing.
As the story begins we’ll learn that the coldest heart in that family was grandmother Khadijah who did her best to break any dreams of a future of the desires of Amina and her two older sisters. All that mattered to her was Jaffar’s wife needed to produce a male heir so they could collect a dowry, and the concern that the girls could never marry because the family couldn’t afford a dowry for them. Women were treated like doormats, punching bags, and a selection of other abuse. In fact, Amina’s mother is never mentioned by her name, only as ‘Jaffar’s wife’. The degradation was palpable as my heart went out to young Amina, in particular.
One evening, Amina’s mother was taking her five daughters to the movie house to watch a movie about Mozart, a real treat for Amina. Only, Amina didn’t make it home in time and was left back. At first I felt it was a cruel trick until the story heated up and that particular night there was wild violence and bombings in the city, and all the movie houses were attacked, leaving many casualties. As Jaffar worried where his wife and kids were as the hours passed, he got the news on the street what had happened.
My heart went out to Jaffar as he recovered the five dead bodies of his wife and four daughters and screamed to Allah for what has happened to his family, and he cried out the name of his sweet wife, Rahat. The first time we learn her name.
As the years pass Amina’s grandmother’s mission was to marry her off, as is the norm. Her father had zero intentions of allowing Amina to study music at the university, despite a family friend, Dr. Sheikh, offering to get her into a musical program for free. And Khadijah was on a mission to get Amina married. So poor Amina was given to marry Iqbal right after finishing grade 10, at the tender age of sixteen. With a swift marriage and moving in with Iqbal and his mother, Amina’s horrible life got worse. Khadiljah was so happy to get some rupees as a dowry that nobody even bothered checking out his background or even meeting the groom. Young Amina’s husband was a sex-trafficker with his mother as the bandleader of operations.
My heart sank for the beautiful Amina and the horrors she was subjected to. But after a few years of being held as a sex slave, Amina finally escapes, bringing us to a much happier ending, despite her horrendous life prior to her great escape.
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