It evoked a feeling in her—of silence and freedom, of riding a bicycle on a dirt track cutting
through fields
In the absence of her parents, Nanaki, a fiercely sensitive young woman, is brought up by her
grandparents in a quaint Chandigarh neighbourhood. She grows up to be an artist and a professor
in an art college. As Nanaki goes through the motions of an idyllic childhood and a difficult
teenage love, her experiences play out against a haunting backdrop of Partition and her Beeji’s
turbulent personal history.
Nanaki is brought face-to-face with the dark underbelly of contemporary Punjab when she takes
up the cause of a consummate embroidery artist against a corrupt system while also being privy
to two women's heartbreaking stories in her immediate vicinity. Through it all, it is her
Sufi bearings that sustain her. Meanwhile, over many motorcycle jaunts to the tiny hill-town of
Kasauli, Nanaki finds love in Himmat, an architect with his own share of personal tragedy and
a scarred childhood.
Meditative, rooted in a location yet filtered through nostalgia, In the Land of the Lovers is a masterfully
woven fable with interlocking tales that explore struggle, loss, longing and love with brilliant
insight and luminous prose.