Things get more complicated when her mother befriends a Kashmiri sales-man named Bashir Ahmed. This leads to her fractured upbringing in a dysfunctional Indian household. Her mother’s dissatisfaction with societal gender roles combined with her father’s sexist behavior are mentioned masterfully throughout the narration. Shalini’s memories reveal her parents’s troubled marriage. The daughter of a successful industrialist and an eccentric mother, Shalini is the epitome of upper class, urbane and privileged lifestyle.
In the very beginning of the story, the narrator examines her own sheltered perspective. “I am thirty years old and that is nothing.”_With this sentence, Madhuri Vijay starts her novel.
Vijay designs her narrative structure with flashbacks, symbolism and ambiguous characterization. It engages the reader through its cleverly woven fabric of story-telling. The prose is evocative, lucid and engrossing. It also deals with themes like the effects of war trauma, family turmoil and illicit love. In this way, the narrative exposes the interpersonal relationships between the characters. The story unfolds amidst political and social conflicts in the country. Through the interlinking fates of two families separated by huge geo-political issues, The Far Field pulls the reader to discover intersectional hierarchies.
The author posits the protagonist’s childhood memories against the backdrop of political issues concerning Kashmir. The story revolves around an urban, educated and privileged woman named Shalini. This ingenious debut work was conferred the prestigious JCB Prize for Literature in the year 2019. The Far Field is the first novel written by author Madhuri Vijay.
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