‘Beyond Our Births’: A debut novel questions the validity of a person’s identity markers
Antara Mukherjee’s novel is a meditation on love – of its undefined, inexplicable nature, and its borderless provenance.
Black News 
Beyond Our Births, Antara Mukherjee’s debut novel, is an exploration of the location of identity. Its narrative – that of a child abandoned by her Bangladeshi Muslim parents, adopted by a West Bengali Hindu family, forced to leave when the family’s fortunes turn, accompanied back to Bangladesh by her parents, only to escape from them soon after – continually questions the validity of our identity markers: caste, class, religion, nationality, gender; and underlines their intersectionality in our daily lives.
But the novel is perhaps even more a meditation on love – of its undefined, inexplicable nature, and its borderless provenance: for neither bloodlines nor boundaries between nations, or that between the human and animal can contain it. Nimki, the protagonist of the novel, whom we see grow from five to 15, feels the greatest kinship with Bagha – the family dog of the Senguptas, with whom she lives in Kolkata. “Their lack of language”, we are told, “made them understand each other. They could neither hurt nor delve deep, but heal each other nevertheless with their faithful empathy.”
Nimki needed this empathy as compensation for her perpetual hunger for love in a household that gave her shelter but couldn’t instil a sense of belonging....
