Light In The Dark

In her soul-wrecking debut novel, Shobha Rao illuminates the unspeakable hardship of being born poor, wilful, and a woman— and the transformative power of female friendship. Cheryl-Ann Couto soaks it all in.

I read this somewhere,” says Shobha Rao. “A doctor is examining a woman, and he asks, ‘On a scale of one to 10, what is your pain level?’ She says six. When she leaves, he tells the nurse, ‘Put down nine. Women always underestimate their pain.’ Then a man walks in with the same condition, and the doctor asks him the same question. He says 11. It makes you think, what are women being made to endure?” The San Francisco-based Indian-American author offers some devastating answers in her debut novel, Girls Burn Brighter (Hachette; on stands mid-June).

Crushing physical labour, bad nutrition and a bracing lack of love, are the order of their lives for adolescent protagonists Poornima and Savitha, who come from impoverished weaver families in the village of Indravalli in Andhra Pradesh. Poornima toils at the loom to provide for her younger siblings and cold, lazy father, who can’t wait to marry her off. She meets even poorer Savitha, who’d been reduced to picking garbage to make ends meet, when Poornima’s father hires her to work the family’s second loom. Their friendship is immediate, electric and sheltering from the wanton unkindness they regularly face. And when a shocking incident rips them apart and sends them hurtling towards catastrophically worse fates—marital rape and torture, sexual and menial slavery, and mutilation—the memory of it is the fraying thread by which they hang on to life.