Call Her Freedom

Call Her Freedom (publication day January 21, 2025) by Tara Dorabji is an intense and powerful multi-generational story of a family in the village of Poshkarbal in Kashmir, starting when Aisha is sent to school by her mother, Noorhajan, though few girls attend school. Her mother is the village midwife and herbalist, and is raising Aisha alone; Aisha does not know where her father has gone, but she finds out later that her mother is having an affair with her teacher. Though she doesn’t speak much, Aisha gets top marks in school.

When Aisha gets older, her mother teaches her how to tend the hidden poppy field and who is safe to sell to, before she dies of what seems like tuberculosis when Aisha is 17. Her family looks in on her, and her teacher makes sure she owns the land, even after she marries the teacher’s son, Alim, and does not attend college because a wife’s job is to tend the home. The marriage is happy, but there is trouble with her mother in law, and she never tells Alim about the poppy fields, which pay for his college and his parents’ lifestyle.

Told from alternating perspectives, with large gaps of time in between, we follow Aisha, Alim, and their family through the hard times, the return of Aisha’s father, separation because the borders are closed, and Aisha’s imprisonment and abuse at the hands of the soldiers who have overrun the village when she refuses to give them the name or location of her young niece. Dorabji uses magical realism, with Noorhajan’s haunting of Aisha’s father and sometimes Aisha.

Some scenes are difficult to read, but Dorabji handles these difficult topics with sensitivity and relates much of the problems the characters face back to misogyny and the inequality of women. Though it is mostly weight-neutral, there is some explicit anti-fat bias expressed by one of the soldiers in a flashback, which was unnecessary.

Otherwise, I thought it was an important and compelling read.