What do You think about The Song Of Kahunsha (2006)?
After finishing this novel a few nights ago I was relieved. The Song of Kahunsha may be described as a cross between A Fine Balance and The Kite Runner. The story follows the orphan boy Chamdi, who runs away from the doomed orphanage to find his father. He ends up on the streets of Bombay (now Mumbai...there is a reference to the new name in the novel) and meets Guddi and Sumdi, two children surviving on the street by their wits and by the grace of Anand Bhai, who controls the neighbourhood through violence and fear. If it wasn't for the bright imagination of Chamdi this would be a bleak novel...but watch for the splashes of colour and hope.
—Karena
Anyone who loved Khaled Hosseini's "The Kite Runner" and Rohinton Mistry's "A Fine Balance" will love this novel just as much. What 10-year-old Chamdi, Sumdi and Guddi go through together is unbelievable.From back cover:"In 1993, Bombay is on the verge of being torn apart by racial violence. Ten-year-old Chamdi has rarely ventured outside his orphanage, and entertains an idyllic fantasy of what the city is like-a paradise he calls Kahunsha, "the city of no sadness." But when he runs away to search for his long-lost-father, he is thrust into the chaos of the streets, alone, possessing only the blood stained cloth he was left in as a baby.Chamdi struggles for survival in the harsh streets. But when he is caught up in the beginnings of the savage violence that will soon engulf the city, his dreams confront reality, and Chamdi finds himself growing up very fast."
—Louise
This book really tore me up! It cut very close to the bone; children trapped in suffering under a cruel hand. The depth of the emotion it evoked in me is doubtlessly linked to my own childhood and that has deeply marked me such that seeing children in those circumstnces and feeling that old pain opens primary emotions that are always overwhelming. I have always felt for children cuaght in this kind of trap and I have known many. In Cambodiain the late 90's the kids selling themselves on the street, begging and rolling drunks who were then visited by their handlers and mercilessly beaten force them to hand over whatevcer they had taken that day. It seems that this particular system of cruel exploitation is in place all over SE Asia.It struck me very deeply at the time and I felt helpless to help them. I learned then that giving them food was the only thing I could do was give them food and watch them eat it and if I was to treat their wounds or their illness it all had to be done immediatley and I had to watch medicine consumed, otherwise they had to hand that over as well because it could be sold.This book lays it all out through te eyes of a sensitive, intelligent little boy in his own words. He is gradually robbed of everything, hope and dignity and made to commit a terrible crime that locks him in guilt and shame.I struggle constantly with the the sense of the world as a threatening and evil place and the suspicion that the bulk of humanity fits the bill both so deeply ingrained in me. The fact that people treatr children in this way just opens up in me a pit of depair, and the knowledge that there is nothing I can do to change it simpley haunts me; always just below the surface except when the concentrated pit is peirced as this story pierced it.
—Steve Woods
