Belonging by Umi Sinha

Rating ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

“He punishes the children and their children for the sings of the parents to the third and fourth generation.”

Belonging is a historical fiction published in the year 2015 and written by Umi Sinha. This is Umi Sinha’s first novel, although the writing hardly makes you believe that.

The story takes you through the lives of three different characters of three different generations – Cecily, her son Henry, and his daughter Lila. The lives of all three of these characters are lined with tragedies and dark, painful days.

How Cecily Patridge marries a man many years older, Major Arthur Langdon, positioned in India during the British Raj and moves through the life of her son, Henry Langdon, who eventually joins the Indian Civil Services and marries Rebecca and then his daughter, Lila Langdon.

While Cecily finds it hard to love Arthur, even though she married him thinking she was already in love with him, Arthur learns to be patient with her and loves the native, i.e., the Indians in his troop.

As Cecily dies during the revolt of 1857, Henry is left to grow up without a mother, until the age of 12 when he is sent to England to be with his mother’s twin sister, Wilhelmina or Aunt Mina, as she is known.

After a lonely childhood Henry returns to India wanting to join the army but ends up joining the ICS instead. He goes on to marry Rebecca, a woman who has nervour issues (as mental illness was known back then).

After years of a mentally draining married life, Henry becomes father to a girl, Lila or Lilian. Lila, unloved by her mother throughout her childhood, at the age of 12, witnesses a family tragedy on the occasion of her father’s fiftieth birthday party that her mother organizes. This tragedy ends her childhood in India as she is sent to Sussex to live with her great-aunt Mina.

Lila grows up resenting Aunt Mina and the two hardly ever see eye-to-eye. Through her years in Sussex, Lila feels alone, except for the company of the Beauchamps and their son Simon’s friend, Jagjit. The story moves through the first world war and how Lila, Simon and Jagjit deal with their individual and combined losses and pains.

While Lila knows how her father dies, rather how he killed himself, she never got to know or understand why he did it and grows up feeling she was the girl her mother couldn’t love and father did not love enough to live for. But as Aunt Mina dies, she leaves Lila the truth about her family. Her mother and her father. Her blood.

This book is a marvelous piece of writing. And by marvelous, I mean MARVELOUS.

The story, the characters, their pains and their tragedies are described in a way that they leave an image carved onto your heart. While the story deals with Cecily, Henry and Lila and their lives, it also sheds light on the unimaginable amount of pain and loss the first world war left behind and the revolt of 1857, or the first freedom struggle, as we like to remember it.

The events of 1857 are remembered as the stepping stone for a united India as we fought for our freedom, but this story describes the events of that year from the perspective of the Britishers. The loss, humiliation and torture that they were subjected to, especially the ones like Cecily and Arthur who had nothing but love for the natives makes you cringe, pity and loath those events at the same time. And then the consequences that the natives faced because of it, which I feel I will never be able to put in words.

This story is the best way to understand that wars kill people on both sides. That they destroy happiness, humans and a lot more on both the sides, not just one.

All in all, a beautiful piece of literature and one I feel everyone must read at least once in their lives!

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