The Woman Who Climbed Trees takes readers into the heart of a social world in which women exist mainly to fulfill men’s physical needs and elders are always right, one which eternally dangles the threat of shame over women and periodically inflicts violence on them. Yet, and this is among the many feats that the Mumbai-based author pulls off, the novel brings alive the emotional depth and drama of women’s lives in such a milieu. As she unfolds her gripping story, she describes household chores, physical surroundings, relationships, thoughts, and feelings in loving detail, her luminous passages filled with empathy, insight and unflinching candour.
When Meena marries Manmohan at 14, her mother tells her that “the only way to be married is to live like you have no husband.” What does she mean?
When Kaveri advises Meena to live like a widow, she is passing on an age-old secret to surviving the loneliness of marriage. For many women in the novel, the absence of a husband is more conducive to living than the presence of one. Meena, too, finds the confinement of marriage difficult to bear but impossible to break.
