Book REVIEW
kashmir memoir
Wounds of an exodus
Talking about his book Palimpsest, the
US literary great Gore Vidal made the interesting observation that ‘a
memoir is how one remembers one’s own life, while an autobiography is
history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked’. Judged by
this definition, Rahul Pandita’s Our Moon Has Blood Clots is both
a memoir and an autobiography– for it is quite clearly how Pandita has
remembered, and continues to remember, his own life even as the
co-terminous historical bits that provide the overall tapestry appear to
be well-researched.
Its sub-title ‘The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits’
is an apt caption for the overall concern that the book shares and
which is narrated through the memory of a young boy cut suddenly from
his moorings and cast adrift. This memory grows and evolves into a
memory of adulthood with its attendant heartbreaks and heartaches,
broken dreams and hopes, always in one exile after another, of
overlapping lives and memories of many other people...Read More
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