Secret Daughter: A Novel

In her engaging debut, Gowda weaves together two compelling stories. In India in 1984, destitute Kavita secretly carries her newborn daughter to an orphanage, knowing her husband, Jasu, would do away with the baby just as he had with their firstborn daughter. In their social stratum, girls are considered worthless because they can’t perform physical labor, and their dowries are exorbitant. That same year in San Francisco, two doctors, Somer and Krishnan, she from San Diego, he from Bombay, suffer their second miscarriage and consider adoption. They adopt Asha, a 10-month-old Indian girl from a Bombay orphanage. Yes, it’s Kavita’s daughter. In alternating chapters, Gowda traces Asha’s life in America—her struggle being a minority, despite living a charmed life, and Kavita and Jasu’s hardships, including several years spent in Dharavi, Bombay’s (now Mumbai’s) infamous slum, and the realization that their son has turned to drugs. Gowda writes with compassion and uncanny perception from the points of view of Kavita, Somer, and Asha, while portraying the vibrant traditions, sights, and sounds of modern India. –Deborah Donovan

Shilpi Somaya Gowda was born and raised in Toronto to parents who migrated there from Mumbai, India. She holds an MBA from Stanford University, and a Bachelor’s Degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A native of Canada, she has lived in New York, North Carolina and Texas. She now makes her home in California with her husband and children.

Gowda spent a summer in college as a volunteer in an Indian orphanage, which seeded the idea for her debut novel. SECRET DAUGHTER (published March 2010) is now an international bestseller, and is being translated into ten foreign languages.

SECRET DAUGHTER has been selected as a “Heather’s Pick” (ChaptersIndigo), an “IndieNext Great Read” (American Booksellers Association), one of Elle Magazine’s Top 3 books, and Good Housekeeping’s “Book Pick to Grab You”.

For more information, visit:
http://www.shilpigowda.com

his beautifully written book, Secret Daughter: A Novel, is one that will linger in my thoughts for a long time. It’s a poignant story about family — just who is “family” and what it means to be a part of one. It’s also a brilliantly written testimony to mothers everywhere, for “if the mother falls, the whole family falls.”

Asha (Hope) was secretly named Usha (Dawn) by her birth mother, Kavita, and is adopted from an Indian orphanage by a married American couple when she is just a year old. Kavita, already grieving the infanticide of a previous daughter in a society that prefers male infants, had made the long journey to Shanti to deliver her 3-day-old child there for safety so that her husband and his family would not also destroy this second unwanted female child. She left her daughter with only a thin silver bracelet and a wish that Asha be allowed to live, grow up, and perhaps have a better life.

Somer and Krishnan Thakkar, both doctors — she’s a pediatrician and he’s a neurosurgeon — have been unable to have a child. He is Indian and came to America to attend medical school and stayed for a better life. She married him without fully appreciating the Indian heritage and his connection to the land of his birth and to the family and traditions he left behind there. When they adopt Asha and bring her back to America to raise, little do they realize that their new beloved daughter will one day defy her parents and seek to restore their connection to their Indian relatives despite the fact that she may hurt them when she begins to trace her birth parents to find out who she is and why they gave her up for adoption.

The story moves forward in time from 1984 to 2009, and is told from the viewpoints of the three main females of the story – Somer, Kavita, and Asha. All are women who have a very strong feeling about motherhood — and about their own mothers. In addition, each woman sees a different India and comes to appreciate the country in different ways even as they realize that “Mother India does not love all her children equally.”

Shilpi Somaya Gowda writes a novel with two separate, parallel stories tied together by an adopted child. She beautifully developed the story about the Indian mother who gave her daughter up for adoption. Gowda did a phenomenal job developing the Indian characters and skillfully described their struggles in rural India and Mumbai. She brought to life the struggles of underprivileged Indian families, families that immigrate from rural to urban Indian cities, the preference for male babies, and the hardships of Indian women.

Gowda fell short in the development of the American story, which included the stories of the adopted daughter and her parents. She began the novel by describing the adopting mother’s struggle with infertility; however, she drops this storyline after adoption of the child. At one point in the novel, the adopting mother and father separate. The couple reunites after the mother finds a lump in her breast. I found this storyline to be contrived. Furthermore, the adopted daughter spends one year during college in India so that she can write a story about poverty, but Gowda only mentions two days of interviews conducted by the daughter with people who lived in the Indian slums. Gowda does a beautiful job describing Indian society, so I was disappointed that she did not examine this storyline further.

Despite the shortcomings of the American storylines, I enjoyed the Indian part of the novel so much that I finished the novel in less than two days. I recommend this book.