No one gets out of here alive

by Ranbir Singh Sidhu

English 256 pages 1 edition

‘I wonder at this thing we call a family, this accumulation of bodies, stories, ghosts and memories, and above all silences …’ Ranbir Sidhu’s searing new work opens with the death of his father and loops back, nine months earlier, to the loss of his mother-‘the gestation period for a human embryo’. Wanting to understand something of their lives, he finds himself on a journey from the working-class neighbourhoods of his London childhood to middle-class California and finally to rural Punjab. Who were his parents, he asks, and as importantly, who might they have been were it not for the ugliness of Partition and the village’s stifling patriarchal grip? In an innovative blend of memoir, essay, travelogue and history, Sidhu charts the geographical space where his parents were born and died, against its deep histories of violence and its demand for a masculinity that suffocates and deforms the lives of both women and men. And all of it tethered to one word that makes imagination impossible: sharam or shame. Diving deep into the personal while piercing the soul of a culture, No one gets out of here alive achieves the incredible – it tells of family, and in doing so, it tells of the unmooring of Punjab.