In vast Delhi, India, the intertwining lives of millions shine through the intrepid lens of She Will Build Him a City, a curious novel by Raj Kamal Jha (The Blue Bedspread). As though indicating a relationship between anonymity and unanimity, Jha names his three main characters Woman, Man and Orphan, effectively broadening their experiences into a universal sense of humanity. He braids together these three and unveils their secret connections in a story full of love and violence, lies and the powerful buoyancy of hope.
Woman tells her daughter a bedtime fable of a 12-foot-tall woman who comes to care for them, and she eventually rhapsodizes about how she both loved and betrayed the girl's father. Meanwhile, in the city lurks a troubled Man, surrounded by darkness as he runs to and from the violence clouding his heart. In the teeming streets, he discovers a little girl with a red balloon, with whom he falls maniacally in love. All the while, Orphan, with a talking dog as his only guardian, is perplexingly abandoned at an orphanage whose director "has never seen a 'normal male infant' being left on his doorstep." Who, after all, lets go of a boy in India?
This novel thrills and mystifies as the characters fumble about Delhi toward an elusive sense of belonging. Jha's prose is wondrous: regarding her daughter's birth, Woman observes, "Along with you, I have also been born, as a mother, and, very much like you, I am clueless in the dark." She Will Build Him a City exhibits myth-making of an impeccable order. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness