The Secret Daughter

1259 Words6 Pages
Essay: Secret Daughter by Shilpi Somaya Gowda deals with a country where sons are favored over daughters, a woman named Kavita conceives her first child, a baby girl, and is brutally forbidden to keep that child, who is then sentenced to death. In the meantime, while many women struggle to conceive, across the ocean, a woman named Somer attempts to conceive a child and was unsuccessful in doing so. Later on, Kavita is blessed by God and delivered a second child, who is again a girl, but this time she is faced with the heartbreaking choice of having to give up her baby for adoption in order to save the baby’s life. Somer later adopts Kavita’s daughter, Asha, giving herself the opportunity to be a mother and giving Asha the opportunity to have a family. Kavita, Somer, and Asha, all struggle psychologically with the reality of the brutality they face as women. Kavita struggles to conform to the idea that she had to give her daughter up for adoption, and the fact that she might not even meet her. Somer is deeply affected by Asha’s desire to know who her biological parents are and the desire she has to meet them, and Asha is extremely affected by the sense of rejection she feels from her biological parents for not wanting her and putting her up for adoption. Kavita’s psychological suffering in the novel has to do with the loss of her daughters. Her psychological trauma begins with the brutality of the way her first daughter was taken away to die. “She was not prepared for what happened last time… Kavita felt her budding joy give away to confusion. She tried to speak, to articulate something from her thoughts swirling in her head” (page 6-7). This quote shows that she was at first happy with the birth of her first child, but her confusion of the moment left her with no response. She could only admire her child and she could not understand why her husband could not see
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