Sita in Exile is a surrealist painting made not on canvas but in words. From the opening lines, “The sun was horrific. It spread itself over the fjord like an overturned pot of buttermilk,” Rashi Rohatgi creates a disorienting world inhabited by Sita, an Indian American who has recently relocated from Chicago to Norway. As Rohatgi chronicles Sita’s attempts to adjust to life in a new country, she also brings us into Sita’s inner existence. Here, the responsibilities of new motherhood, carnal temptations, and the urge to leave everything and return home pull at Sita as she tries, and ultimately fails, to keep her secret world hidden from those around her.

The book opens with Sita struggling to find her place in a cold Arctic setting, where the stark landscape mirrors the loneliness she feels. Despite her melancholy, her Hindu culture initially keeps her grounded as she tries to meet the societal expectations of her French husband, Pierre, her surfer friend, Mona, and Mona’s Norwegian husband, Morten.

Throughout the story, the perspective shifts between Sita’s past as a promising young student and her current reality, in which her internal and external life continually intrude on one another. At times, it’s almost impossible to tell which world is real. 

Sita’s sanity comes into question as her inner world clashes more and more with reality. This confusion is most evident in Sita’s relation to Nenn, the pet mongoose. While Pierre is away for work, Sita’s interactions with Nenn blur the distinction between reality and imagination. Five weeks after he joins the household, the mongoose informs her that he is “going for a walk, and would she please leave the door slightly ajar, as he couldn’t reach the door handle.” Sita responds with unease: “For a few days after that, she was wary of him, unable to determine whose responsibility it was to speak next.”

After she gives birth to her son, Lars, those around her begin to recognize the fragility of her state. Pierre takes Lars more often, and Morten and Mona invite Sita to stay at their cabin by the lake. Questions arise. Which of Sita’s experiences are real and which are imagined? Did she sink further into psychosis after giving birth to Lars, or his birth just made her psychosis more evident to those around her? 

With Sita in Exile, Rohatgi spotlights the real difficulties of postpartum depression and social isolation. These difficult subjects are portrayed in vivid prose full of color and through magical descriptions more in line with fairy tales and myths than with modern fiction. The juxtaposition adds to the dreamy quality of the story. In one scene, Sita, alone in the woods, comes across a tree with jewel-like fruits: 

She plucked the fruit, one in each palm, and sat on the ground as though she had just seen a sick man, and an old man, and a dead man. If she took a bite and held it in her mouth, she could appreciate the quiet, the swell of pride that in the village comingled with her own knotted self-regard. […] When she took the other rose apple into her mouth and swallowed it whole she felt herself disappear, and—for more than a moment—she was happy.

With Sita in Exile, Rohatgi has written an unsettling book that raises questions about the line between the physical world and an emotional inner reality that shifts shapes and blends lines. She also asks the reader to work. Sita is not a passive reading experience. The reward, however, is a beautiful page-turner of a story that bends and sculpts the material world into a fictive dream with blurry edges and hazy focus. 

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Rashi Rohatgi is the author of the prize-winning novella Where the Sun Will Rise Tomorrow and the first English translator of the seminal Mauritian novel Blood-Red Sweat. Originally from Pennsylvania, she now lives in Norway.

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Jim Almo is a writer and musician living in New England. His work is appears in Reckon Review, Emerge Literary Journal, Five Minutes Lit, and JMWW Journal, among others. He is on Bluesky @jimalmo.bsky.social