"Bodies in Motion"

[sergebroom]

She was good with math, good with small, precise calculations. If Chaya added this to that, then looked over there, in exactly the right place – she’d find the hidden star. A tiny bit off, subtraction instead of addition, a misplaced decimal, and it would be lost to her sight, lost in the expanse of constantly moving celestial bodies, and the vast spaces between them. But she rarely lost a star. She didn’t know words – bodies in motion, that was what she knew. That was all she knew.

Yesterday I finished Mary Anne Mohanraj’s mainstream novel “Bodies in Motion”. It begins in 1939, in Ceylon’s Colombo, when Thani, reluctant as he is to part with his daughter Shanti, could not find it in him to keep her from going to Oxford, where she'd find the sustainance that her mind craves, and to make her own path in life. The story ends early in the 21st Century, in Sri Lanka’s Colombo, with Mangai, whose own ways had not been acceptable to her world. Between the beginning and the end, we follow each generation, mostly the women, as they try to follow new ways - many of them in America - and often find themselves drawn back in by the weight of Family and the safety it represents. The old ways don’t necessarily mean happiness though.

Recommended.