Fantastic collection of short stories about Sikh women throughout the century and living around the world. Some of the best stories I've read about women and their need to follow honour,but also the anger and confusion this causes in a rapidly changing world. Very moving fiction. All the stories are told with excellent subtlety. A very strong recommendation for a relatively new writer of short fiction.

Probably one of the best pieces of fiction I have ever read. In fact, I asked my friends not to give me another book until it matched Singh Baldwin's quality.

The narrative and characters remain with me two years later. What more can a reader ask for?

This book is a wonderful account of the Indian (predominatly Punjabi) immigrant experience in America and Canada. The author's lyrical prose brings the reader into each character's life on an intimate level, rather than making the reader feel like a casual observer. Although most of the short stories are told from a female's point of view, readers across the board will be drawn in by the author's in depth afinity for character evolvment. The short story, Montreal, 1962, is the highlight of the collection, with it's tearful account of a Punjabi housewife's ability to see beyond the symbolism of her Sikh husband's turban.

This short guide is a must for new immigrants or even kids leaving for college. Covers everything from setting up housekeeping and bank accounts to how, exactly, to wash dishes! Clear and concise it's also a delightful look at our culture from an "outsiders" point of view.

Ms. Baldwin's evocation of Punjab in the 1930's is so realistic one's throat becomes parched reading her brilliant prose. This novel is a story of the complicated interrelationships of Hindu, Sikh and Muslim families whose centuries-long guarded yet mostly peaceful co-existence is shattered by what is the violently-birthed beginning of the state of Pakistan. Ms. Baldwin's characters, particularly Satya, the first wife, and Roop-bi, the young, second, childbearing wife, are so real, one awakens surprised to find oneself not living near the cool storerooms of the mansions of the rich.

As political intrigue, the tale also regales. The perilous journey thousands of families were made to take, based on religious differences (the state of Pakistan is Muslim) leaves the reader fearful for the protagonists lives as they pretend to be faithful servants of religions they've only observed.

Satya, the Urdu-speaking barren first wife, is almost palpable. Her character would be played on American television by no less than Susan Lucci. She's Machiavellian to the core. She seethes with hatred when her husband brings home a teenage bride from a poor family to bear an heir. She plots revenge. How she obtains it is one of the most shocking and pitiful scenes in modern women's literature.

Roop has her own secret to keep, which, if revealed, would make her "unmarriageable" and a permanent burden on her family. She is aware that her husband gives her his first wife's jewels as presents and that her sole reason for being brought into a feudally-bourgeoise existence is for the fruit of her loins.

From my perspective, the men in this book almost don't count. They plan water irrigation systems, they hate each other's families, they rape and kill their perceived enemies, they are brutal and dense.

The portraits of Satya and Roop-bi alone (and the peripheraly historical Ghandi, referred to by an endearing nickname) is worth spending the three days nonstop it will take you to read.

"It was the moment when his beard scratched her cheeks and his falcon eyes looked directly down upon her, held her eyes until he must have seen how very small his face was, how very tiny, reflected in her gray eyes. And in that long, long moment, she knew Sardarji expected her to lower her eyes before him."

Satya recalls, in Shauna Singh Baldwin's book What the Body Remembers, the single moment when she knew what her husband wanted but that she could never do: lower her gaze in front of him. It is this quality of hers to look him in the eye and tell him the way it is that also eventually separates him from her. That and the fact that she could not bear him a son.

With the 1947 Partition of India as the backdrop, WTBR is a loving portrait of the Sikhs - the community of people from the Northwest corner of India. Baldwin has used research and her own experiences as a Sikh to draw the three main characters: Sardarji, his wife Satya, and her nemesis Roop, the young girl Sardarji marries secretly so she could give him a son. They linger in your mind long after you close the book. Using minute layers of details of Roop's life as the ground, Baldwin has drawn Roop's character, her longings, her fears, her courage, and most importantly, her endurance. Satya and Roop, the two women married to Sardarji, so different in their personality and character, yet live under the same fear and belief: the fragility of their security. From different levels of prosperity and status they each see with clarity the ease with their lives can be blown all away at the slightest show of free will, of disobedience. It is a story lived by many women in all cultures. The Sikh women in Baldwin's story surprise us with the strength they show in adversity, the way they bend without breaking when their world falls apart and reshapes in permenantly altered states.

What the Body Remembers falls into the genre known among my friends and I as "awful/wonderful." "Awful/wonderful" books tell painful truths in such a compelling manner that the reader greedily ingests them, even aches for more. This book, with its no-holds-barred tale of the treatment of women in India, whether Muslim, Hindu or Sikh, can be painful to read--but it's impossible not to. Of all the novels I've read by and about Indian women's lives, What the Body Remembers was by far the most disturbing. And yet I was sorry to close it after reading the last page--it was throughly engrossing, and as fascinating in its way as Memoirs of a Geisha. I highly recommend it.