The Wonder House by Justine Hardy

The Wonder House by Justine Hardy is a story based on the day to day life of the people in Kashmir. Its about an English widow of an Indian prince spends her days on a very old houseboat on Nagin(Snake) Lake in Kashmir with mute Suriya and her beautiful daughter Lila. Enter Hal, a journalist from England who falls in love with Lila ( I wonder why people fall and not rise in love). Hardy not only provides a rather engrossing love story but also a troubling picture of the "Kashmir problem". Though it provides loyalties of the local people, struggles of human relationships, a different but not unrelated personal tragedy unfolds with sympathetic account of recent times but lacks historical and, at times, political depth.

We come to feel for Gracie Singh, who seems real but yet so illusionary in her own self, who is sometimes over the top, yet so human and real in her heartbreaking loneliness. Likewise we are persuaded to accept the delineation of the motives behind a young boy from a loving home joining Kashmiri militants or the way passion blooms between Lila and the British journalist Hal. The state that Gracie finds herself in at the end of a long tragic life:

Gracie twitched and stared out at the lake beyond her narrowing world. There was a sound of gunfire from the city… A small boat moved across her horizon, its shape an upward brushstroke on the water.
And in the copper market in the city beyond the lake a teenage boy fell in the street across the road from an army checkpost. The bullet that killed him entered just below his collarbone and exited under his Adam's apple. The street was empty around the body, and a young soldier behind the sandbags vomited out of sight of any of the surrounding shopkeepers as they pulled back behind their stacked copper pots, silent hermit crabs.
The lake remained quiet.

Though its a fiction but seems so real with the background of political and historical events which are somehow related to the indo-pak conflicts created by a hand full of britishers with their so called theory of divide-n-rule, leaving the readers with many unanswered questions.

Was the kashmir issue always about land and religion or was it about the people with one soul but two bodies which further got divided into partitioned countries?

Where is the love and equality in the land which was one's known as the land of cultures and colours which is now left with moaning in their hearts which has just one wish to be one one's again.

Is it only adream or can we make it come true?