It’s quite upsetting and gross to read about. He is found dead and Meena is horribly burned. The story Smita finds herself covering is pretty gory: Meena, a Hindu woman, married a Muslim man, and her village took revenge on the couple by setting them and their home on fire. There really is a special, emotional familiarity in old tastes. Anyway, there’s a moment when Smita, despite extremely mixed feelings about returning to India, get a familiar cup of Nescafe, and I just loved it. If you haven’t gotten a can of coffee from a Taiwanese 7-11, you’re missing out, I love these sweet coffeedrinks, and they taste like my winter teaching in Taipei, too. Also, I was reading Honor on our road-trip vacation, and part of my vacation indulgence was a bunch of Taiwanese canned coffees. Smita has a lot of complicated emotions around her return, and the details of taste, sounds, smells, and little familiar customs in the city helped to bring this to life. I loved the sensory details in Smita’s return to India. Although Smita has already successfully covered dark and upsetting gender stories around the world, this unfinished story of an honor killing in a small village will open up parts of her past and cause her to re-examine basically everything. She thinks she’s going back to help a friend and fellow journalist recover from an injury, but really her friend Shannon wants Smita to finish covering her story while she recovers in the hospital.
In Honor, by Thrity Umrigar, an Indian-American journalist, Smita, returns to India after many, many years away.
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