Book Review Title: The Blind Lady’s Descendants Author: Anees Salim Publisher: Penguin India 2015 Pages: 301 Price: Rs 399 A metaphorical blindness is part of most people’s lives. We fail to see many things and hence live partial lives. We make our lives as well as those of others miserable with our blindness. Anees Salim’s novel which won the Raymond & Crossword award for fiction in 2014 explores the role played by blindness in the lives of a few individuals most of whom belong to the family of Hamsa and Asma. The couple are not on talking terms for “eighteen years,” according to the mother. When Amar, the youngest son and narrator of the novel, points out that he is only sixteen, Asma reduces it to fifteen and then to ten years when Amar refers to the child that was born a few years after him though it did not survive. Dark humour spills out of every page of the book. For example: How reckless Akmal was! ...
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