A debut novel that keeps you awake!

The title is intriguing and for a debut novel, the book more than fulfills the tantalising promises of the title. It has tragedy, pathos, bathos, comic moments—in short it is a complete human drama that is engaging in its universal appeal. Mira Jacob weaves the plot with innate finesse of a seasoned wordsmith. The novel’s protagonist is the 30 something Amina Eapen, an Indian second generation immigrant to the US. She is an ace lenswoman who has abandoned her budding photojournalist career after a controversy over a picture that she took of a suicide—a Native American activist jumping off a bridge. Now she spend time as a wedding photographer but stays away from her family. The story spans three generations, two continents, multiple lives and covers India of the 1970s, specifically south India to the suburban 1980s and moves to New Mexico and Seattle of the 1990s.

It is fascinating how the author has maintained an overall light tone and heartwarming comic appeal in the book despite the fact that each page is an exposition of familial wrangling, haranguing, personal loss and unmitigated tragedy, Amina’s father, an insomniac brain surgeon, unhinged by the death of his only son seeks escape in work. But as his insomnia aggravates, he starts seeing and talking to ghosts. The estranged son learns the lesson of loss of a beloved child in a rather hard way, what he had failed to see in his own relationship with his mother, whom he returns to India only to bury.

There are bitter family feuds, harsh words are spoken, wounds that never heal and bonds that that remain broken. All through this tale of Eapen family, sleep or more aptly the disorders related to it, are the central leitmotif. The insomniac Thomas Eapen, his sleepwalking brother Sunil, who destroys ‘things’ in his sleepwalking trips, Akhil, Thomas’s son, who suffers from a sleeping disorder and the tragedy caused by sleepwalking.

The story has been captured with photographic precision through the lens of Amina, the photographer protagonist. She presents an unbiased point of view of characters, a non-judgmental rendering of their human failings. It is for the reader to construct his point of view. In a family plagued by various varieties of neurosis, Amina is the voice of sanity, though highly imaginative and creative. The book is a tender rendering of human foibles, a witty and gentle look at the people you love.