Award-winning book shares immigrant family reflections on India's partition

When Madhur Anand's mother suffered a heart attack in 2015, she had a realization and immediately began recording her parents' stories.

Five years later, those  family stories became an award-winning book — This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart.

"It did start off with a realization pretty late in my life that I didn't actually know much about my parents' lives, and I wonder how common that is for a lot of people, and maybe especially second generation immigrants like myself whose parents have come from somewhere very different, very far away," Anand told The Morning Edition's host Craig Norris.

"I just kind of took it upon myself to be the person in my family to start to record their stories, things that they had been telling me of their time in India."

Anand, a University of Guelph ecology professor, has won the 2020 Governor General's Literary Award for her book.

I became a poet and a scientist, both of which are things that I think my parents are curious about and are proud of, but don't quite understand because we don't have those professions in my family.- Madhur Anand

The Governor General's Literary Awards, run by the Canada Council for the Arts, are one of the country's oldest and most prestigious literary awards programs.

Anand's book — one of five finalists in its category — starts by recording the childhood of her parents, both of whom were still living in India in 1947 at the time of the partition of India and Pakistan after British rule.

Anand said her parents' stories took on "more resonance" as she got older.

"As I got older, I also developed my own identity … I became a poet and a scientist, both of which are things that I think my parents are curious about and are proud of, but don't quite understand because we don't have those professions in my family," Anand said.

"So, I think it was that development as a poet and a scientist, those lenses, which in fact I take on to retell their stories."

Three main characters

There are three main characters in the book — Anand, her mother and her father — but it also includes others, including family, friends and Anand's colleagues.

Anand said the title is an actual line spoken by one of the characters in the book. 

"Somehow after writing the book and looking through the book I thought, 'Wow, that actually speaks to the whole book itself,' because I start with a red line, it's called the Radcliffe Line, and that's the actual line that was drawn on the map to divide India into its two new countries," Anand said.

"I started with that and I realized there was a trajectory, there was a line I was going to follow, but it was not going to be a straight line and yet all of the stories are so full of emotion. So, I think it also kind of just plays on the poetry and the science approach that I take throughout the book." 

'It's kinda wild': Book has a non-traditional format

Anand said when she brought the idea of the book to her publisher she was only planning to write the stories of her parents' lives.

But she said her own voice crept in so strongly that she wrote another set of stories about her own life. With the two sets of stories, she opted for a "flip" structure instead of a linear one, so the book is told in two parts and has two covers.

"It's kinda wild. There are two covers," Anand said. 

"You enter one side and it's my parents' stories. You get halfway through the book and then you encounter upside down text and that's because you have to flip the book over and there's a second cover, it's my voice."

Anand said while her mom remains ill, "she's well enough to know the accomplishment of this book and is proud of it."