O Sister Swallow

Shouldn’ t there be a bridge from the known to the unknown? In this exquisite elegy, Suniti Namjoshi reflects on the life of her sister Bharati, their overlapping yet disparate lives, their nearness and distance, and what it means to belong and to be valued. The two sisters love one another and they love birds; but they live on different continents and think in different languages. Is this what sisterhood is really about – to acknowledge difference and still to understand and to care? This richly textured book with its tender and elegant language is full of both joy and grief. It is a generous yet poignant invitation from the author to us to contemplate our own experience. If the casual, implacable insolence of death could be answered by building a monument or by writing an elegy, perhaps it would do till language crumbled and the edifice fell.