Publisher's Synopsis
On the eve of her wedding, Vasti finds her arranged marriage is to the rapist she saw through a curtain of sugar cane stems twelve years ago. She either speaks out, defies convention and shames her family, or succumbs to tradition and submits to her fate silently. A parallel story runs throughout the novel. Three women are about to climb upon a burning pyre to die with their husbands to fulfil the suttee or widow burning custom practised in India for hundreds of years. This story of female emancipation is as harrowing as it is beautiful.
