Midnight’s Daughter is a powerful and poignant memoir by Sarita Sarvate, a longtime columnist at India Currents. For more than two decades, she authored The Last Word, a sharp, incisive column that offered glimpses beyond the familiar desi stories of the perfect Indian couple with high-achieving children.
The book chronicles her intrepid journey from her childhood in Nagpur, a mid-sized city, where she grew up in a family of modest means and with a mother who had mental health issues. Sarvate excelled at school and earned a master’s in Physics, yet succumbed to family pressure to enter an arranged marriage.
After making her way to UC Berkeley for a master’s in Energy and Resources in 1976, she decided to end her loveless marriage and move to Hawaii as a researcher. In that role, she studied alternative energy systems and promoted rural development in Asia and the Pacific. Soon, she followed a lover to New Zealand, where she took her first writing class.
Midnight’s Daughter is a hero’s journey, chronicling one woman’s remarkable adventure across continents and epochs. She escapes poverty, patriarchy, and mental illness, shaping her identity with the aid of multiple cultures and traditions. The book intertwines her grit with her vulnerability, self-doubt, and brutal honesty, whether writing about her sexual relationships or her mother’s mental health challenges.
Sarvate is fearless when she writes about her decision to check into a mental health facility while suffering from clinical depression following a devastating miscarriage. Her candor is rare in South Asian memoirs. While the book is about her life, it allows readers to recognize their own messy, imperfect lives and permits them to live in the duality of achievement and anxiety.
The title, Midnight’s Daughter, is drawn from the name Aruna, which her father gave her. It was inspired by Aruna Asaf Ali, the Indian freedom fighter who presided over the remainder of the 1942 session of the Indian National Congress after its leaders were arrested following the passage of the Quit India resolution. In her early thirties, Asaf Ali hoisted the Indian Flag at Gowalia Tank Maidan on August 8. The moment reflects a parallel in Sarvate’s own story: the young twelve-year-old took on household duties along with her father after her mother suffered a nervous breakdown.
The title alludes to Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, but Sarvate’s story is told from the viewpoint of a woman born on India’s Republic Day.
The narrative highlights various milestones of Sarvate’s life. It starts with a chapter about her stay at Eden Hospital — A Vacation at the Insane Asylum — and the backstory of why she arrived there. I appreciated the structure, weaving between past events, then spinning forward to 1988, when the narrator opens the yellow pages to call an adoption agency from a phone booth. Et Voila! As soon as she returns to her cubicle, she gets a phone call that an Indian baby is available to adopt.
Of course, nothing is that simple. Both her life and the book have ample twists and turns. Reading her memoir, I felt immersed in a suspense novel, wanting to know what happens next.
Sarvate also has a way of interlacing books, newspaper articles, and songs from both modern America and ancient India to reflect or contrast with the moments and themes in her story. For example, the reference to Nehru’s speech on India’s independence, “Long years ago we made a tryst with destiny and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, … At the stroke of the midnight hour, ……we step out from the old to the new,” … concludes with the acknowledgement that she is Midnight’s daughter and wants her soul to find utterance.
Another lyrical reference to Indian mythology appears when Sarvate describes the village of Ramtek, where her mother, a widow’s daughter, grew up. She points out Ramtek as the place where the cloud messenger in Kalidasa’s epic poem Meghdoota once landed.
Some paragraphs are particularly evocative:
As the paperwallah tosses the Nagpur Times over the gate, Dada jumps out of his cot and fumbles to open it. Scrutinizing it, he says, “You made it.”
I run to him. He points to my name in the Merit List.
For years, my father is only known as the one whose daughter was in the Merit List. The List confers on him the kind of status he has never had in Nagpur before. The boss, who normally never looks at him twice, regularly asks him about his daughter’s progress at the university.
And,
Some evenings we visit the British Council Library.
It is there I come across an article in the Daily Cal, a student bulletin from the University of California, Berkeley. It describes a new graduate program called the Energy and Resources Group, or ERG. The acronym tickles me, for erg is the unit of energy required to accelerate a mass of one gram at a rate of one centimeter per second squared.
Meeting Stuart, the Yorkshireman, who becomes the love of the narrator’s life, she writes:
Is it then that I sense in him Mr. Rochester, the love object of Jane Eyre, and the ultimate hero of the English novel?
She expands the reference to include Stuart’s Polish ex-wife Olga:
When I first met Stuart, Olga had been but a shadowy figure, the ex-wife to thicken the plot of my novel. In Jane Eyre, the governess is vaguely aware of the shadowy presence of Mr. Rochester’s first wife, Bertha Mason, who lives hidden in the attic.
Olga’s story allows the author to develop a greater understanding of her mother’s life: the widow’s daughter who struggled to become an educated working woman, but found herself subjugated by Indian patriarchy, leading to her mental breakdown.
I particularly enjoyed the story of Krishna’s adoption from Hindu mythology:
Vasudeva carried Krishna to the other bank where a cowherd lived with his wife Yashodha. Vasudeva handed the boy to Yashodha.
Krishna, with his magical powers, had found Yashodha, just as Ravi, with his extrasensory perception, had found me.
Sarvate scrutinizes the love triangles, her own and the one in Jane Eyre, through a feminist lens; she sings a Marathi train song from her childhood while questioning it, as if she has somehow fallen into a colonial trap by marrying a white man. It was at this point I broke into goosebumps.
Sarvate’s language is evocative and places the reader in the location and the emotion of the moment. For example,
Outside the Nagpur railway station, Tibetan refugees sit on a grassy knoll, knitting cardigans of jute. The sun is a flat, shadowless, white. I ride a cycle rickshaw, watching maimed beggars sitting under the railway bridge. A blind boy sings a haunting melody. Don’t worry about happiness. Happiness is like the shade of a neem tree; it comes and goes, but sorrow will always be your companion.
At 85, Shankar Nagar, Aai is squatting under the guava tree, rubbing her forehead. In the middle room, Pradip is playing film songs on the radio.
And:
It is precisely because it is the opposite of what I expect that Berkeley turns out to be the most hospitable of places I ever imagined. Hippies sell their wares here. Students browse in shops with names like Shakespearewallah, Rather Ripped Records, and Orange Julius. Men in cutoff jeans pass by me without so much as a glance, even though I am wearing a blue and white nylon sari, a wedding necklace of gold and black beads strung around my neck.
The bright September sky creates the illusion that I’ve flown halfway around the world and returned to India.
The year is 1976.
At school, a teacher once said it’s not whether you have gone through the book; it is whether the book has gone through you. Midnight’s Daughter is definitely one of those books; it left me mesmerized, jolted, and haunted long after I left its pages.
Publisher: Vine Leaves Press
Publish Date: September 22, 2026
316 pages
English
ebook: ASIN : B0H7JHMN4D
ISBN-13 : 978-3988322821
