I wrote other books, contemporary novels set in India and America. They featured complicated women protagonists, some strong-willed, others downright stubborn, making waves wherever they went and suffering the consequences. I admired these heroines and thought of them as very different from Sita. Wasn’t she, after all, good and meek and long-suffering, bearing her misfortunes with silent stoicism the way the perfect Indian woman was supposed to? Wasn’t that why, when our elders blessed us, they said: May you be like Sita? And wasn’t that why that statement always angered me?
