A tomb is meant to keep things still; sand does the opposite.
When I picked up Geetanjali Shree’s “Tomb of Sand”, translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell, I thought I knew what I was getting into. A Partition novel, I assumed, would take me straight to 1947; to borders, displacement, grief and all the violence I had already read about in history.
Instead, there was Ma, eighty years old, facing a wall.
The book moved slowly. Sometimes too slowly for me. It wandered through conversations, memories, objects, strange repetitions. I kept waiting for the “actual” story to begin. I wanted Partition to arrive clearly, almost dramatically. At first, I was bored. What puzzled me was how deliberately the novel refused to become the story I had expected.
Then, Ma gets up.
That small moment changed the book for me. After her husband’s death, everyone assumes she is fading away. I assumed the same. But she becomes curious, mischievous, almost stubbornly alive. When she travels to Pakistan, she is not simply crossing a border. She is moving towards a version of herself, a love and a home that history had decided no longer belonged to her.
That was when Partition began to feel less like an event and more like a wound that refused to heal. A line could be drawn on a map overnight, but people could not be redrawn with it. Families were divided with it, yet, they still remembered lanes, people, smells, and routine – the things that made a place home. There is something cruel about being told you are now foreign to a place your memory still recognises.
The border could remove people from a place but could not remove the place from them.
I had always imagined the past as a country we leave behind. This novel made me wonder if we carry its citizenship much longer than we realise.
Even the book reached me by crossing a border. I was reading “Ret Samadhi” through Rockwell’s English. At first, I kept wondering what was lost in translation. Later, I wondered more about what it had managed to carry across.
I think memory works similarly: details blur and change over time but things remain with us long after borders are drawn.
I began “Tomb of Sand” waiting for history to arrive. Only later did I realise it had been there from the first page, quietly facing the wall.
Published October 6, 2026
