THE SNOW LINE

Old and young, white and brown, male and female, British, Indian, Other: Four strangers travel to India for a wedding in search of wholeness, love, and endurance in the face of change and violence.

Northern India, 2009. Four travelers disembark from the Dhauladhar Express at the Pathankot train station, having arrived in Punjab to attend a wedding. Yosh, 30, a yoga teacher from Vancouver; Monica, 30, the bride's cousin from Toronto; Reema, 26, the bride's childhood friend, a mixed heritage Londoner in search of her Indianness; and Jackson, 86, who is returning to India after a long hiatus in Boston, and who carries with him
a sma ll tea canister in which he has placed his wife Amelia's ashes.
As they gather with other guests at a traditional Indian wedding, Jackson and Reema develop an unlikely friendship that grows through mutual need and a slowly developing trust, and together w ith Yosh and Monica, they embark on a post wedding journey to the Himalayas, seeking the perfect place to scatter Amelia's ashes. As they travel together, secrets are revealed, and each of them is opened up to more questions than
answers.
These intergenerational and intercultural relationships are a meeting of the past and the future, a reconciliation of past wrongs and a possibility that the future might be less violent, less selfish, less segregated. But can it be?

TESSA McWATT won the 2018 Eccles British Library Writers Award and the 2020 OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature, in the Non-Fiction category, for Shame on Me: An Anatomy of Race and Belonging. She co-edited, with Dionne Brand and Rabindranath Maharaj, Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada. Her fiction has been nominated for a wide array of prizes. A professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, she lives in London, U.K.