She also finds herself increasingly drawn to Mohan, an Indian man she meets while on assignment. While Meena’s fate hangs in the balance, Smita tries in every way she can to right the scales. As she follows the case of Meena-a Hindu woman attacked by members of her own village and her own family for marrying a Muslim man-Smita comes face to face with a society where tradition carries more weight than one’s own heart, and a story that threatens to unearth the painful secrets of Smita’s own past. Indian American journalist Smita has returned to India to cover a story, but reluctantly: long ago she and her family left the country with no intention of ever coming back. In this riveting and immersive novel, bestselling author Thrity Umrigar tells the story of two couples and the sometimes dangerous and heartbreaking challenges of love across a cultural divide. *** Reese Witherspoon has selected Thrity Umrigar’s HONOR as her January Book Club Pick! I’ve really come to enjoy Reese’s picks and will definitely be reading along this month!

Thank you Algonquin Books for inviting me to participate. Today, I’m so happy to be a tour stop on the blog tour for Honor by Thrity Umrigar. “When you return,” he said, “please come and use the key to remove your belongings.”.

My dad, on the other hand, had made our neighbors put their jewelry in his locker themselves and then given them the key to it. There were many sad stories of families returning home after the riots ended and finding that those whom they’d trusted with their assets had swindled them. What I learned much later from the Muslim family who lived next door to us was that they had earlier brought all their jewelry to Dad for safekeeping before they fled the neighborhood for a few weeks. We were Parsis, a small, prosperous, and educated religious minority in India the joke was that there were so few of us, nobody saw us as any kind of threat. I immediately worried about my family’s well-being, but he brushed aside my fretting. But I can still hear the bewilderment in my father’s voice as he later recounted the incident during our weekly phone chat. It had been set on fire by a mob of angry Hindus who had heard that a Muslim family lived on the ground floor.īy this time, I was living in faraway America, safe from the paroxysm of insanity and violence that gripped Bombay-the erstwhile most tolerant and cosmopolitan of Indian cities-during that terrible period. In 1993, my middle-aged father stood on our balcony and watched helplessly as the apartment building across the street burned.

Honor by umrigar