The Garden of Solitude

The Garden of Solitude is a poignant tale of a Kashmiri Pandit family driven away from the Valley in the wake of armed insurgency and political turmoil. Sridar, a young Pandit boy, is torn apart as he reluctantly leaves his home situated in the beautiful Valley along with his family. The family, like the other Pandits, settles in Jammu, where an entire generation of Pandits spends the rest of their lives suffering from a sense of loneliness and alienation. The older people are shattered due to the forced migration and many of them suffer from dementia as a consequence. Sridar soon begins to find solace in his writings and leave Jammu to pursue full-time writing. However, his love for his homeland brings him back to Kashmir; he is now writing a book on Pandit migration. He is pained to see how the forced migration to Jammu has transformed the once prospering and happy community of Pandits into a pained and estranged populace. Troubled by his tumultuous past, he is now trying to find answers to the questions that define him. The first novel in English written by a Kashmiri Pandit about the political turmoil in Kashmir, migration of Pandits and their life and plight in exile.