Name: Everything Was Good-Bye
ISBN: 9780143186816

Gurjinder Basran

Meena, a sixth daughter of a widowed mother, struggles to bridge cultural gaps between her family's India traditions and her North American upbringing, a situation that is further challenged by her love for a man who asks her to run away with him.

Everything Was Good-Bye

Edwin Lang

I enjoyed this book immensely. I hope Ms Basran has the energy to write more and as well. I found the heroine and the choices she made believable. Sometimes we’d wish that other decisions and paths be taken but life is generally not like that. We tend to make questionable choices, suffer some harm and, if we are lucky, learn. Meena seemed to me, as were almost each of Ms Basran’s characters, a prisoner of her culture. I recall – I think correctly – that the Talmud instructs us that we are products of the times we live in. We are prisoners too, and perhaps it can become a rather comforting prison: and, that it takes a miracle, a prophet, a tragedy, or maybe a good book, to help us escape, presuming there’s a spark of an idea that we want to, that we should. I wonder if that’s why conscientiously reading books – or even newspapers – can be a challenging and sometimes unnerving endeavour, and may be a reason why some people find it difficult to do either. I remember a colleague and friend, who was a good man, a family man and a Muslin, tell me that the scope of the call to be charitable during Ramadan only applied to one’s extended family, which of course might include hundreds. I realized what a treasure we have in the catholicity of Christianity, which is so deeply embedded in much of Western thought and governance, where every person, regardless, is precious, and where the outreach is inclusive. It seems that cultures that are as insular as Ms Basran describes might have difficulty understanding this desire to help even the strangers in our midst and, implicitly, our enjoyment of diversity. Possible spoiler alert It was interesting that Liam – that light in the darkness – was the one that had to go, and in spite of Meena’s embryonic emergence towards a mature adulthood in her late teens, that she should relapse into the acceptance and comfort and identity of her closed society. And that Sunny was the one to emerge victorious: I could imagine him with a smirk saying to his friends, with an adoring Jasmine on his arm, ‘That’ll teach them to try to fuck with Sunny!’. Edwin

Everything Was Good-Bye

Reviews

Highlights