his is a coming-of-age story with a fault line running straight through its main character’s birth certificate. Born the day the Babri Masjid fell, Saanvi Trivedi inherits a house divided, Hindu and Muslim, temple and mosque, memory and myth, and spends the next decades learning how to live where the ground never stops shifting. The book braids family chronicle with civic diary, turning Ayodhya from backdrop into battleground and, finally, into a place where imagination might do the hard work politics won’t.
What makes it electric is its refusal to simplify. Saanvi’s Hindu father, Ramesh Trivedi, and Muslim mother, Yasmin Khan, herself the daughter of a Hindu convert, carry their own contradictions, as do the grandfathers who bookend the conflict: Shyam Trivedi, unwavering in his temple advocacy, and Adil Khan, a tireless Muslim organizer. The narrative keeps faith with all of them, even as it charts the ways public slogans splinter private lives. Scenes have a reportorial bite, marches, meetings, hushed kitchen arguments, but the prose stays intimate, alert to the small generosities and quiet betrayals that actually steer a family’s fate.
Across these pages, identity isn’t a box to check but a practice: a daily negotiation of prayer, language, festivals, and fear. The book’s most moving passages show Saanvi learning to hold tensions without letting them harden, claiming her identity in a city that keeps insisting that one like hers cannot exist. The result is bracingly honest and unexpectedly hopeful: a portrait of coexistence not as slogan but as skill.
Readers who reach for memoirs that look history in the eye while keeping their hearts open will find this irresistible. It’s a fearless, tender record of one woman building a bridge and then daring to walk across it
