Umrigar aptly tackles honor killings in rural India and paints Meena with agency and depth. citizenship like armor, she knows spending time in a 'city she'd spent the last twenty years trying to forget' will force her to confront her past.

Smita's return to Mumbai triggers memories of an unspeakable act of violence and betrayal she experienced as a teenager before she and her family fled to Ohio. Smita's hesitation to take on the assignment goes beyond her rusty Hindi and the uncharitable assumption of Mohan, Shannon's friend, who deems Smita a spoiled Indian American thumbing her nose at her country of origin. She eventually gives birth to their daughter. Meena, pregnant and severely injured, barely survives. Meena's brothers, hellbent on exacting revenge on the couple for their interfaith marriage and the dishonor it has brought, set fire to the newlyweds' hut while they are inside. The complainant, Meena, a low-caste Hindu, goes against her community and religion to elope with her beloved, Abdul Mustafa, a Muslim. Before she's wheeled into the operating room, Shannon begs Smita to travel to Birwad, an all-Muslim village near the Gujarat-Maharashtra border, to report on a groundbreaking legal case in her place. She is rushing to the bedside of her colleague Shannon Carpenter, a South Asian correspondent, who is facing imminent surgery.

Thrity Umrigar's latest novel, 'Honor,' begins with a vacation cut short when Smita Agarwal, a foreign correspondent from Brooklyn, is forced to abandon the sunny beaches of the Maldives for an unexpected detour to bustling Mumbai.

Umrigar honor