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The novel Lucky Boy, by Shanthi Sekaran, is a heart-wrenching story that gives voice to two mothers: a young undocumented Mexican woman and an Indian-American wife who love the same child.
However, this book is much more than a moving read. It has sparked a controversial debate about human rights and the treatment of illegal immigrants in the US.
It could not be a timelier topic either, as President Donald Trump continues with his bid to build a wall along the border and fulfill a key campaign promise, along with trying to ban people arriving from some Muslim-majority countries, of course.
Every year, countless illegal alien parents are detained and deported without their US-born children – families torn apart without the chance to ever reunite.
Shanthi’s novel is based on meticulous research and raises explosive issues of immigration, motherhood and class.
The author is sought-after by US media for interviews, opinion and education pieces. Sekaran was born in California. Her parents, both physicians, came over to America from India in the 1960s, a time when the US was recruiting medical professionals.
Sekaran got a Master’s degree in South Asian studies, moved to Germany for a year, married and spent six years in England, where she taught academic writing at a local college. She entered a Ph.D. programme and began writing what would become her first published novel, The Prayer Room.
A week before giving birth to her first child, Sekaran found an agent and got a book deal. The Prayer Room came out in 2009. “It was good to have that under my belt before having the baby, which didn’t happen with my second book,” she says.
With Lucky Boy, Sekaran hoped that she would finish the book before giving birth to her second child, but the manuscript wasn’t ready in time. With her new son only two weeks old, she was back at her laptop working on Lucky Boy. “I felt a sense of urgency,” she says. “I ended up writing stuff at three in the morning. The baby would wake me up and that’s when I’d get the writing done.”
Sekaran says motherhood deepened her understanding of ‘what it is to be human’. She added: “In terms of being a writer, I think when you really have your soul and your heart at stake the way you do when you have a child, you’re completely vulnerable. When you have that sort of vulnerability you have a heightened experience of the world. You have so much more invested in it.”
Lucky Boy went through several rounds of rejections before being snapped up. “Penguin Random House has made it a mission to bring this book into the hands of as many readers worldwide as possible, as an appeal to compassion in turbulent times of displacement,” Christine Swedowsky, the publishing house’s director of international marketing, told GulfWeekly.
To call him ‘lucky’ is not an ironic gesture on Sekaran’s part, but it’s also not an uncomplicated one. Much of the book’s conflict hinges on how fortunate baby Soli is to be loved fiercely by two women — his mother, from whom he is taken when she winds up in an immigration detention centre after a traffic stop, and Kavya, who fosters him, intending to adopt him and make him her own.
“Sekaran’s handling of this situation, though humanistic and ultimately uplifting, does not oversimplify or sugarcoat the wrenching difficulty of such a situation,” said one literary critic.
Because of the way Sekaran examines the vagaries of economic inequality and the messiness of love in addition to the intricacies of immigration and adoption, Lucky Boy would make a ‘promising pick for a book club’, another reviewer wrote.
With that in mind, The Gulf Weekly Book Club has three hard-back copies to offer as prizes before they go out on sale on the island, at a price to be confirmed, at The Bookcase stores shortly.
-If you want to win the first copies of this book in Bahrain, simply email editor@gulfweekly.com to sign up to join the free Gulf Weekly Book Club and, alongside our family of current members, answer this question: Who did President Trump say would pay for the wall? The first three correct entries opened at noon on Sunday will win the prizes and will be notified to collect Lucky Boy from our offices in Manama. The Editor’s decision is final.
