A story of the middle-upper class Sikh experience with the events leading up to partition and the actual partition in the late 1940s, this book especially focuses on women's experiences with growing up and living in a time when multiple groups lived next door to each other and then divided. The book is highly recommended as it covers so many aspects that bring the period and experiences into a vivid depiction. A commentary on the partition can be applied to many instances of boundary-making... I am going to use a quote from the book as part of a class on deep maps and thin maps.
A key character in the book, Sardarji--an economically-successful Sikh engineer in India--thinks about maps. He also thinks in terms of gender exclusivity and how he sees boundaries between expectations of how men and women act. (As a side-note, he is the husband of two women, one of them does not meet those expectations--another important component of the book.)
“Maps lie.
Surprising. He has never realized this before, but maps lie.
Maps lie, for their colours can show nothing of what a man feels when he says, “I come home.” They say nothing of the distance a man will ride to avoid passing through areas inhabited by another’s caste or quom, or the direction a man turns when he bows his head to pray. Maps lie, their scrupulous lines diminishing height to hair’s breadth, contracting realms of the material to fit in the mind. Maps lie, the artful cartography separating earth from sea with a simple line that refuses to tell that one does not end where the other begins, but continues, undergirding the sea.
They are an aesthetic achievement, that’s all. Essential preparation for the next map that will be drawn, essential for discussions and negotiations, but in themselves mere approximations of the terrain, aids to dreams of conquest, marking familiar places in the roaming mind.” (p. 380)
Baldwin, S. S. (1999). What the body remembers. NY: Doubleday.