Book Title:-The Peacock Garden
Author:-Anita Desai
Plot:- The outer circumstances of The Peacock Garden are terrible: Zuni, a young Muslim girl, is forcedto flee with her family in the middle of the night to escape mob violence at the time of Partition (of India and Pakistan, at independence–when many Muslims were driven from India into Pakistan and many Hindus were forced in the other direction). Zuni’s life changes. This is not merely a refuge for her buta whole damn new world.
But this is a child’s eye view of the happenings and what Zuni notices and thinks about aren’t those large political issues, but the bonfires as they flee (“immense ones with hungry blue and orange and scarlet flames reaching out into the hot, parched air”) , her missing doll, when they take shelter with other refugees in the local mosque, and the sights and sounds within the mosque compound. Though terrible things happen in the background, this is not remotely an awesomely depressing book. Zuni focuses, as children often do when they’re not personally suffering, on the beauty and freshness of her new surroundings and on theadventure of living a completely different life. Because the story is told from her point of view, it’s rewarding reading for both a child, who can see the whole story as she sees it, and for an adult, who will catch the ironies and the perspectives of her family that Zuni is far too young to understand.
A snapshot is presented right in front of you,mesmerizing you.So grab your copy and soak yourself into the aura of this book!
-MISBAAH MANSURI
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