The Peacock Garden

THE REDISCOVERED CLASSIC CHILDREN’S BOOK: A Muslim girl lives through the 1947 partition of India in this historical fiction book for kids ages 7-10 about finding strength and hope amidst loss.

The Peacock Garden is a story of a young Muslim girl named Zuni and her family’s near escape from the violence of the 1947 partition. Unwilling to leave India, they flee their village and find shelter in a nearby mosque where Zuni is comforted by the natural beauty of the mosque’s inner gardens and the peacocks who live there.

In Anita Desai’s delicately balanced prose, the adults are admirably direct and honest with the children. “These are bad times,” her father says. “It is safer to stay here till everyone is calm again.” Desai takes in a wide view of the world, the difficult political reality as well as the gentler gifts of the physical world: big-eyed bullocks, loquat and banyan trees, sweet-scented jasmine bushes. The abundance of the gardens is a counterweight to the loss of Zuni’s former life in the village, and she finds herself not entirely sad to make this place her new home.

This lost classic of historical fiction for young readers, now back in print, shows that hope and beauty can be found in the midst of loss and destruction.