Review of Where the Secret Lies

Review of Malika Gandhi’s

Where the Secret Lies

Reviewed by Roy Murry

India is still a mysterious place to most people in the west even though its population is over one billion.  This ambiguous thinking on the part of us Americans and others is due to the lack of understanding of India’s culture which emanates from the Hindi and Muslim religions.

Ms. Malika Gandhi’s Where the Secret Lies, in a two story package, allows her reader into that culture.  One story is the romantic journey of a young lady vacationing in India from England with her Indian family, circa 2000.  The other is that of a young lady’s plight during the conflicts of the Indian and Pakistani partition in 1947.  The stories converge into an unlikely ending.

Ms. Gandhi’s stories are well thought out and detail so the reader will not get lost in cultural differences.  Love is the same in all cultures.  It’s only the norms set down by our elders that dictate how we are to love.  Here is where Malika has shined in her storytelling.

The romantic clashes make one think – how could this be?  In both stories the love triangles are full of emotional conflicts, because of the cultural miss understanding of the parties involved in a male dominated world vs. the new world order where women have their say in their destiny.

Ms. Gandhi’s two stories converge because of one common element.  That being, the young lady of present has a common spirit with the young lady of the past.  And that mysterious question is answered when a door that has been unopened for years, because of a murder, is opened by a spirit.

I enjoyed Ms. Malika Gandhi’s tale on two levels. One being the way she explains the culture of India through her prose and the other being the detail of that prose.

Ms. Gandhi’s links are below in her interview:  http://bit.ly/130CEiq