Category: Literary Fiction
Rights: All rights available
At its heart is a formidable village woman, Gowra, living in her ancestral house where recipes are prophecies and the pantry sings the family’s heritage. Young Gowra is the wife of folk healer, singer, and freedom fighter, Shankara and goes about her routine lifting live embers with bare hands and sowing seeds in her fields by the riverside, even as she spends a decade burying her stillborn babies.
But everything shifts the night a wandering saint arrives at her doorstep.
Gowra feeds him, and what begins as an act of hospitality slowly transforms into something far stranger and more spiritual. Before disappearing into a storm-dark night, the saint levitates, speaks prophecy, and leaves Gowra with a way of seeing the world that she cannot fully explain — only live through. Unable to demystify his words or deeds, Gowra lets the walls absorb the mystery.
It takes sixty-five years for the mystery to resurface, when Gaura’s granddaughter Saavi dismantles the house and finds her grandmother left behind—a woman who refused to leave even as the house crumbled, who turned it into a forest and disappeared inside.
The author: Savita Hiremath