👩🏻‍🎓Book: Ahalya’s Awakening

👩🏻‍🎓Author: Kavita Kane

👩🏻‍🎓Genre: Mythological fiction

👩🏻‍🎓Pages: 349

👩🏻‍🎓Publication: 2019, Westland

👩🏻‍🎓Book cost: ₹399

Blogpost by Dhanu

5 /5

Wishing to look after the ways towards their goal and passion will be questioned and restrained?

In the name of marriage, can’t you decide when and how you spend the rest of your life?

As a married woman, can’t you wish for more towards your goals and be passionate about your career?

What happened if she married her love of life and still denied the love she yearned for?

There are more questions that are still popping in my mind whenever I see this book or remember the story of Ahalya.

Ahalya is the name always remembered in the society for her act of expressing her love to someone other than her husband and getting punished for it. But how many of us had got the knowledge that she is one of the greatest Panchakanigas from the ancient Indian epics or who she was before she put herself in the position.

I chose to read this book as the first read of 2023, which become a masterpiece of my readings, and added it to the list of my favourite reads. The most alluring thing about this book is that one of the chosen female-centric protagonists of the author is narrating the story of Ahalya to the readers. I was mesmerized by the fact Menaka, the protagonist of the novel, Menaka’s Choice is to narrate the tragic life story of Ahalya’s Awakening.

The novel sets in Kambilya and Ahalya is none other than one of the twins of King Mudgal and Nalayani from Panchala. Due to her respect on Indra, Nalayani decided right from the time of her daughter’s birth that she will marry her daughter to the current Indra, Shakra.

But, what’s the point? The one decision without taken under the concern of the daughter even before she realizes her being as a baby had caused unrepairable damage in the life of Ahalya, Gautam, Shakra, and even the wife of Shakra, Sachi who had never for the entire love from her husband.

All she hoped for was her education and life toward her passion, But her family pushed her into the situation of getting married. The marriage was in the name of her choices, where the suitor was already decided by her mother. And all she has to go on with the drama of accepting that she is going to choose the partner as per her choice, which her mother had chosen for her.

But destiny made her to receive her dream life with her partner. All goes well until her lovable partner turned distant towards her and questions her worth, her long lost or denied and stolen dream of hers, she was promised for educated life, and the only love she desired for. Everything made her vulnerable and put her in a position to bend her morals. Yet she is the only one who is being blamed so far. To remain a silent victim of convention?