In Exile

Award-winning journalist Sadiya Ansari's In Exile is a deeply personal probe into a family secret that takes her across three continents and back a century to understand why her grandmother Tahira abandoned her seven children for nearly two decades.

Equal parts memoir and investigation, Sadiya punctures the silence around her daadi's decision to follow a man from Karachi to a tiny village in Punjab. Through her inquiry, she confronts difficult historical truths: the pervasiveness of child marriage, how Partition made refugees of millions of families like her own, and how the freedom achieved in 1947 did not extend to women's lives.

Discovering her daadi eventually left the man but stayed away from her children, Sadiya wonders: Who was she during those years when she was no longer a wife or mother? And for Sadiya herself, disinterested in marriage and children, the question begets another: What space is available to women who defy cultural expectations?

In seeking out Tahira's story, Sadiya discovers what her daadi's life was like during that separation and, unexpectedly, finds sense of belonging in a culture that at first blush shuns women for wanting lives of their own.