This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart: A Memoir in Halves

Synopsis

An experimental memoir about the Partition, immigration and generational storytelling, This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart weaves together the poetry of memory with the science of embodied trauma using the imagined voices of the past and the vital authority of the present.

We begin before the red line is drawn across Punjab, with a man off balance: one in one thousand, the only child in town whose polio leads to partial paralysis. We meet his future wife, on the wrong side of the line, chanting Hai Rams for Gandhiji and choosing education over marriage. On one side of the line that divides this book, we follow them as their homeland splits in two and they come together, moving to Canada and raising their children in mining towns and in crowded city apartments. And when we turn the book over, we find the daughter’s tale: how the rupture of Partition, the asymmetry of a father’s leg, and the virus of a mother's rage made their way to the next generation. Told through the lenses of biology, physics, history and poetry, this is a memoir that defies form and convention to immerse the reader in the feeling of what remains when we’ve heard as much of the truth as our families will allow, and we’re left to search for ourselves among the pieces they’ve carried with them.