Margret and Vishnu

A mother’s worst fear is realized when an innocent game reveals her children’s internalized assumptions of race, in this stunning novel from an award-winning author, for fans of Rachel Cusk and Aysegül Savas.

Set over the course of a single, unrelenting day in 2002, Margret and Vishnu follows Meera—a mother of five, freshly postpartum, sleepless, raw—as she prepares for her four-year-old’s birthday party in a house alive with need and noise. Her eldest daughter, Margret, has become inseparable from the newborn Vishnu, believing herself to be his second mother. The family’s mixed-race identity, once background noise, has sharpened in the wake of 9/11, becoming both an external threat and an internal reckoning.

Through the thousand invisible cuts of a life spent giving, Meera navigates the impossibility of being everything to everyone, and the quiet terrors that take root in love. How do you raise a daughter in a racist world when you are brown and she is paler than you? What damage do we inflict in trying to protect? How do we live with the violence of our own love?

Margret and Vishnu is a searing, lyrical meditation on the unspoken dangers of motherhood—the kind that ripple through generations, and hide in plain sight. 

• "Margret & Vishnu is a beautiful and unsettling treasure. Its comedy comes from the most watchful attention; its heartbreak comes from the courage to face nothing smaller than mortality. I loved this book."
  Megha Majumdar, author of A Guardian and a Thief