Honor

by Thrity Umrigar

By telling Smita’s and Meena’s love stories—one taboo, the other not; one constrained by societal prohibitions, the other by her own inhibitions—I wanted to examine notions of privilege and inequity, and the simple luck of the draw that separates a Meena from a Smita.

But there’s also another love story at the heart of Honor, one that describes Smita’s love-hate relationship with India itself. The novel poses the question of whether it is possible to love a country when you’re ashamed of its po...