Tomb of Sand

An eighty-year-old woman known mostly as Ma sinks into a deep depression after her husband's death, turning her back to the world from her bed. Then, to her family's astonishment, she rises into an unexpected second life. She forms a close friendship with Rosie, a transgender woman, unsettles her grown children, and eventually insists on traveling across the border to Pakistan, returning to the Partition she survived as a girl and to a past her family never knew. Shree tells the story in exuberant, digressive prose where birds, doors, and borders all have voices, building a family novel that is also a meditation on grief, gender, and the line that split a subcontinent.