Set in 1938 India against the backdrop of Mahatma Gandhi's the to power, Water follows the life of eight year old Chuyia, a child bride who is abandaned at a widows' ashram in Benares after her fifty year old husband dies. There, she is expected to spend the rest of her life in penitence.
Unwilling to accept her fate, Chuyia becomes a catalyst for change in the lives of the widows. When her friend, the beautiful widow-prostitute Kalyani, falls in love with Narayan, a young, upper-class Gandhian idealist, the affair boldly defies Hindu tradition and threatens to undermine the delicate balance of power within the ashram. Sidhwa's sensitve storytelling makes this a novel rich with unforgettable characters.
Water offers a riveting examination of the lives of widows in colonial India, but ultimately it is a hounting and lyrical story of love, faith and redemption.
Born in Karachi and brought up in Lahore, Bapsi Sidhwa, a graduate of Kinnaird College for Women, now lives in Houston. Sidhwa held a Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe, and received the prestigious Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Writers Award. She has taught at Columbia University, the University of Houston, Mount Holyoke College and Southampton University. She has been awarded the Sitara-i-Imtiaz, Pakistan's highest national honour in the arts.
We feel pleasure to introduce ourselves as Printers , Publishers, Distributors and Exporters of the Holy Arabic text, commentary and translation in English and of publications of Islam and Islamic studies in order to propagate Teachings of Islam.