Ruth blinked. In the hazy days which follow that episode a fearful blur of mundane pointless dreams pummeled her through restless daylight hours and long-drawn nights. Dreams, quite ordinary, yet so detailed and accurate that they became impossible to separate from reality.
This novel is the story of three female protagonists who migrate from youth to maturity. Ruth is a Londoner who comes into contact with the others through a shared medical infirmity. The focus here on the dreams which present a hazy world of ambiguity between fact and fiction, illusion and the real world, is of central importance and significance. The description here seems to be one that goes over the line, creating a madness that may not exist, but the truth is that this particular quote is much closer to literal than one might initially suspect. Ruth’s world is mired in the blurry divide between nightmares, dreamscapes and the geography of the real world on the other side.
The threat of the anorexia had never been completely forgotten in the family. Rani was still her mother’s delicate darling who had to be protected from everything just in case…that awful unnameable illness struck again.
Rani is a Pakistani who gets to know Ruth in a London clinic she has been sent to as a result of her anorexia. The thing is, however, that Rani’s treatment may not be entirely necessary. Because her anorexia may not be entirely factual. The themes of reality versus illusion are at work in the story of Rani as a result of the question over whether she is truly physically suffering from anorexia or whether she might be a victim of some sort of entirely psychological debilitation.
In that moment, she finally accepted the match in her head and made an instantaneous decision about telling the girl. Everyone knows how important it is to handle carefully the moment when the announcement is made to the girl, and the manner in which it is made. So, she spoke in a gentle voice, in steady measured tones.
The third women at the heart of the narrative is another Pakistani. As a young teenager—the poor daughter of the gardener for Rani’s more affluent family—Reshma is married off to a man twice her age who is already married and widowed and comes with two children already in supply for the young woman barely more than a child herself to mother. It is this moment of decision excerpted above being made by her mother--being made out of Reshma’s hands and over which she exercises no control—that is the guiding moment of her life as her story swirls in and out and around those of Ruth and Rani.
