Defying Expectations and Undoing Generational Curses: Exploring South Asian History and Folklore

Join bestselling author and award-winning journalist Sadiya Ansari with writer and artist Manahil Bandukwala for a conversation about the impact of relearning their histories as women in the diaspora, as reflected in their work.

Thursday, March 20th
6:15pm to 7:15pm – Doors open at 6pm

RSVP via email: events@octopusbooks.ca

In Exile: Rupture, Reunion, and My Grandmother’s Secret Life is a deeply personal investigation that takes us across three continents and back a century as Sadiya Ansari seeks the truth behind a family secret. Why did her grandmother Tahira abandon her seven children to follow a man from Karachi to a tiny village in Punjab? And though she eventually left him, Tahira remained estranged from her children for nearly two decades. Who was she in those years when she was no longer a wife or mother? For Sadiya herself, uninterested in marriage and children, the question begets another: What space is available to women who defy cultural expectations?

Through her inquiry, Sadiya discovers what her daadi’s life was like during that separation and she confronts difficult historical truths: the pervasiveness of child marriage, how Partition made refugees of millions of families like hers, and how the national freedoms achieved in 1947 did not extend to women’s lives. She sees the threads of this history woven through each generation after, and finds an unexpected sense of belonging in a culture that, at first blush, shuns women for wanting lives of their own.

Sadiya Ansari is a journalist and author based in London. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, VICE, the Irish TImes, The Walrus, and the Globe and Mail, among other publications. She has reported from four continents, and her work has changed legislation and won awards. She is co-founder of the Canadian Journalists of Colour, a 2021 R. James Travers Foreign Corresponding Fellow, and a 2023–24 Asper Visiting Professor at the University of British Columbia.

Heliotropia, Manahil Bandukwala’s second collection of poems, is a meditation on love during times of social and political upheaval. As a sunflower’s growth reaches toward the sun, so, she suggests, is a lover’s growth compelled by the gravitational pull and soul-light of their beloved. Many of these poems are in conversation with other poets and artists, creating a lineage of call and response. Against a backdrop of terrestrial crisis, come, spend your precious minutes in love’s Heliotropia, where we are magnetized by the unfathomable dark matter of another person, and know ourselves as celestial bodies flowering in spacetime, together.

Manahil Bandukwala is a writer and visual artist based in Mississauga and Ottawa, Ontario. She is the author of Heliotropia (Brick Books, 2024) and MONUMENT (Brick Books, 2022), which was shortlisted for the 2023 Gerald Lampert Award, and was selected as a Writer’s Trust of Canada Rising Star in 2023. She is the co-creator of Reth aur Reghistan, a multidisciplinary project exploring folklore from Pakistan through poetry, sculpture, and community arts. See her work at manahilbandukwala.com.

Part of the Authors Unbound Spring 2025 literary event series.