The Folded Earth by Anuradha Roy

 

This was not the life Maya had planned.  She had planned to love and grow old with her husband, Michael but his death while on a climbing exhibition had changed everything.  She can't go home as her father had disinherited her when she chose to marry Michael outside of their religion.  But the priest who married them finds her a job in a remote Indian village, Ranikhet which lies at the foot of the Himalayas that took her husband from her.  Maya becomes a teacher in the local school and heads up the canning factory that supports the school.

She also makes her own family from the villages.  She lives in a cottage on the lands of a huge estate where Diwan Sahib lives.  He is an old man who once ran the territory but now sits and watches the world from his veranda.  He is rumored to have letters between Nehru and the wife of Lord Mountbatten and Maya is helping him write a biography of another famous man, a hunter who rid the territory of maneaters.  

In another cottage on the estate, an old woman lives with her son and granddaughter.  The granddaughter had been one of Maya's pupils but quit coming to school as she preferred to roam the hills with the family's cattle and goats.  Her father is a drunkard and her mother died so she lives with the grandmother and her uncle.  The uncle is strange; not talking to humans but in synch with all animals.  These people are Maya's new family. 

But things never stay the same.  Diwan's nephew, Veer, comes to stay between his jobs as a guide.  Eventually he and Maya fall in love.  The girl next door, Charu, has also found a love but it is one that her grandmother will never approve.  Diwan gets older and more frail.  Secrets start to emerge until the truth of all these intertwined lives is revealed.

Anuradha Roy is an Indian author.  Her work is full of descriptive phrases that take the reader to the small villages of India and their culture and poverty.  The villagers know everyone and everyone's business and secrets are hard to keep when one is living so close with others.  The remoteness of the village brings the people closer together but makes for a prison for those who have experienced the wider world.  Maya is determined to move on and make another life for herself but is life in a small village what she needs?  This book is recommended to readers of literary fiction.