The Kashmiri Pandits are one of the most under-addressed victims of turbulence in Kashmir. We have heard them mentioned in debates and newspapers but have known little about how the exile unfolded for them, how they have fared since they left Srinagar and settled in Jammu and Delhi in the eternal hope of going back home, someday. Siddartha Gigoo chronicles the life of a Kashmiri Pandit family and people in exile. The Garden of Solitude is a rites of passage novel about waiting and losing memory.
The militants and call for Azaad Kashmir force the protagonist Sridar and his family to leave his home in Srinagar. Himself in exile, he witnesses the effects of the migration in Jammu and Delhi and finds solace in putting his reflections on paper, becoming a writer. His varied life shapes his sensibilities and he strives to make sense of the tragedy. He finds camaraderie in a young boy in Benaras and love in Ladakh. Then he loses his grandfather to amnesia and old age. It is when he inherits his grandfather’s trunk that he learns of his ancestor having written a book. A book that he can’t find, that is not available. That sets him on his mission to chronicle the life of exile, to write his own book.
Some stories recounted by migrants had gaps. There were long spells when nothing happened. A civilisation ceased to exist; it dangled between nothingness and forgetfulness. Sridar did not know how to unknot the knots in the many stories he wrote. The treads connecting the story of one man to the story of his father and mother and grandfather and grandmother simply broke in the middle.
Maybe like the four stages of life per Hindu belief, The Garden of Solitude is in four parts. Each part chronicles a stage of exile: the violence real, the horror perceived, the coming of age, and the last captures Sridar’s homecoming after 15 years. Though his return is like that of a tourist because he has to go back and live in homes where people hang pictures of gods, but not of their own ancestors.
The writer’s intention and sensibilities hold the reader, but what is lacking is an anchor to meander through the dense complexity of the experience of exile. In a novel with such a broad sweep of time and events, in which every small occurrence is someone’s lived experience, it becomes difficult to keep the balance between details and story telling. That is where the novel seems to be over-written.
Siddartha uses the third person omniscient point of view, which is a large lens to portray the reality. The portions that stand out as a voice are the letters and other italics and stories in dialogue format where the narration is anchored in a persona. Maybe if he had not hesitated to use the ‘I’, first person point of view or picked a character as narrator, the novel could have been leaner and more effective as a well-told story.
That is where editing could have made a huge difference. We did not need things, though raw in emotion, to be overstated. In his debut novel Siddartha has used his pen well, I hope in subsequent works he uses his scissors effectively. Read the book to learn of the exiled existence of a whole ethnic group, a group disfranchised from the very land that was once theirs and may never again be theirs.

Amandeep Sandhu is the author of Sepia Leaves