Sakina's Kiss

Summary

A taut story of hidden violence and self-deception from “an Indian Chekhov” (Suketu Mehta)

An upper-middle-class couple in Bangalore, Venkat and Viji, find their quiet life upended—and the flaws in their marriage exposed—when two strange young men come knocking at their door in the middle of the night, claiming to have business with their daughter, Rekha, a college senior who happens to be visiting relatives in the countryside. Venkat—a narrator whose account of his marriage, and of the lives of his wife and daughter, we soon learn to doubt—sends the boys away, but they come back the next day, and now they’re not alone.

While Venkat begins to fear for his daughter’s safety, he is haunted by the memory of a betrayal and disappearance from long ago. As his guilt-ridden imagination leaps between knowing and unknowing, evasion and confrontation, Shanbhag reveals not just the tensions in a marriage or a family, but also the polarization of Indian politics and the resurgence of the Hindu right.

Precise, enigmatic, and suspenseful, Sakina’s Kiss fulfills the promise of Vivek Shanbhag's lauded debut, Ghachar Ghochar, which Parul Seghal called A great Indian novel . . . elegant, lean, balletic (The New York Times).