Midnight Daughter

Description

Rumana had been born at the glorious midnight of independence of India and at the gloomy moments of its partition. She had audaciously survived two holocausts in the subcontinent and lost everything she loved in life.

Rumana, born in Delhi amidst the orgy of bloodshed subsequent to the partition of India in August 1947, migrates with her parents, Madar and Sharfun to Lahore in newly formed state of Pakistan, scuttling through dense forests and saving herself from the carnage and massacres. A few days later in Lahore, Madar rescues a Hindu boy, Raja owning him as his relative from a lynching Muslim mob. Despite stay for about a decade in Lahore, they were unsettled. Hence Raja staggers to Bombay, India to search his parents lost during the partition and Rumana with her father navigates to East Pakistan in the quest of a better future, but oblivious that another holocaust was waiting for them after a decade. The emergence of Bangladesh compounded with appalling waves of mayhem and murders of both Muslims and Hindus in Chittagong in 1971, coerces them to return back to India. What happens to them in India, how they encountered Raja, who had morphed into a puissant don in Bombay, who had made several adversaries in the underworld and who was also in intense infatuation with desperate and winsome Rumana? What were the consequences when Rumana to conquer love, dissuades him from the gangland is also a stirring saga? This is an inimitable book that illustrates the two horrific holocausts of the subcontinent in graphic details. Mr. M. V. Kamath, the veteran diplomat and journalist suggested a film on this book during his inaugural address in 2004 in Delhi.