About Daddy opens with ashes and ends with a funeral. Simran, brought up in the US, has made the pilgrimage back to India in order to scatter her father’s ashes at the Wagah border, in keeping with his troubled memories of Partition. All that it takes is the placing of the rosewood box in front of the barbed wire fence that demarcates India and Pakistan, and Simran’s in an Indian jail, suspected of being a spy. The combined efforts of her American fiance, Scott, and an Indian journalist, Arun, extricate her, on the understanding that she will leave the country in 72 hours.But bureaucracy has swallowed up the box of ashes, and her stint in jail has left Simran burdened with other people’s histories in addition to her father’s. She stays on illegally, risking the certain comfort of Scott and life in the US in order to follow the threads of these stories, united only by a common violence. They make a tangled but familiar skein: Sultana, her fellow prisoner, whose killing of the Hindus who butchered her family ensures that she is branded a terrorist; Arun, struggling to make some sense of contemporary India; Kalida, former Naxalite-turned-peace activist riding the shockwaves unleashed by the demolition of the Babri Masjid. Rising above all their voices is Simran’s father, Manohar, whose life and death were irrevocably marked by Partition and by the violence that preceded and followed it.
Nayak’s storytelling skills are not even, and the emotional tenor teeters between genuine pathos and unabashed melodrama. But the power of her message carries the reader through, as does the character of Simran, who mixes naivete with courage. As Simran moves closer to comprehending the raw violence that shaped the lives of her father’s generation, it becomes even harder to fathom the more sophisticated, carefully calibrated violence of India 50 years down the road from Partition. There are no easy answers for Simran or for the readers who’re willing to traverse this well-trodden road with her. As for Nayak, she has no answers of her own, only questions, and that’s finally what gives About Daddy a forceful, insistent claim on our imaginations.
