Based on a true story, ‘Meena’s Story’ coversa span of nearly eighty years from 1939 when her mother, Elizabeth Burdett, stumbled on an escalator in London and fell into the arms of a dark, handsome Indian. Before long, she boarded a P&O liner bound for Bombay, to join him. The voyage to Bombay was easy. The myriad challenges that faced her from the moment she was led to hide in the servants’ quarters of her Muslim husband’s family house in Hyderabad, that was something else - comic, ironic, and tragic in equal measure. Set in India, Pakistan, England, and Canada, Meena’s ‘flight to freedom’ is not an escape from captivity, but rather an escape fromhaunting memories. The physical and geographical dislocations that affect Elizabeth(named Zareena by her mother-in-law) enmesh Meena as well. Swapna Gupta brings to a story of simple livestossed about by forces of religion and political violence a sensitivity and understanding that weaves together threads of love, family attachments, fear, loss, and remembrance in a moving narrative.

Swapna Gupta was born in Shillong, in the hills of Assam, India. After studies in Shillong and Calcutta, she travelled and taught school in Napier, New Zealand, and Sydney, Australia. In 1972 she moved to Boston where she obtained her Doctorate from Boston University. In New England, she has taught in the Lesley College Schools and Assumption College in Worcester, Mass. In 1981 she joined the Alberta Children's Hospital in Calgary, Canada, where she worked for nearly three decades as a Clinical Psychologist. She is the author of a children's book, translated from Danish, "Osvald, the Monkey who Disappeared", and co-author of an acclaimed collection of short stories, "The Irrelevance of Space and Other Stories." "Meena's Story" is her debut novel.

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