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Aug 06, 2014DorisWaggoner rated this title 3.5 out of 5 stars
A full step above a beach read, this story of multi-cultural love during WW II raises serious issues. Nerys' grandchildren must go through her things after their grandfather dies, finding an exquisite, worn, Indian shawl, and a baby's curl. Only Mair among the grandchildren feels a need to pursue the grandmother she didn't know, and goes to Kashmir. Not realizing the area's in the midst of tribal warfare, she finds herself caught between that and the beautiful, exotic setting Nerys wrote of in her journal decades before. She meets people who knew her grandmother, and a charismatic young Western couple on their way to Srinagar, whose delightful toddler dies of the bite of a rabid dog. Mair learns that her grandparents' marriage wasn't aways happy, as his vocation made him feel guilty about their love. He left her alone for months on end, while seeking converts. Nerys is befriended by an enigmatic man, not in uniform and therefore suspect. They fall in love, though unspoken. He helps get a pregnant woman out of India, promising to return for Nerys, but never comes. Her husband returns for her, more than a year late, and after the war, they return to Wales, where they finally have their only child. The setting is of course exotic, evoked beautifully; the Indians are sympathetically portrayed against the backdrop of the stiff WW II Brits, and, yes, there are romances, in both parts of the parallel stories. I greatly enjoyed it, though it was a bit difficult to keep the various plot threads from unraveling in my head at times.