The binding vine

Plot

""There can be no vaulting over time," thinks Urmila, the narrator of Shashi Deshpande's novel. "We have to walk every step of the way, however difficult or painful it is; we can avoid nothing." After the death of her baby, Urmi finds her own path difficult to endure. But through her grief, she is drawn into the lives of three very different women. As the stories of these women unfold, so does a tale of quiet courage and strength." "The first women Urmi is drawn to - her long-dead mother-in law, Mira - exists only in the notebooks she has left behind, discovered by chance in a dusty storage trunk. Mira's journals and poetry reveal the pain of a vibrant young woman trapped in an unhappy arranged marriage, and of a gifted writer whose work, because she is a woman, must remain shrouded is secrecy and silence. And then there is Kalpana, the survivor of a brutal rape and a young woman who has also been silenced. As she hovers between life and death in a hospital ward, Kalpana is watched over by her impoverished mother, Shakutai, with whom Urmi forms an unlikely bond of mutual comfort."--BOOK JACKET.