The Sea Has the Answers

Urmimala Das’s elegant, upper-crust life is shot to pieces when several former women colleagues of her husband accuse him of sexual harassment and assault. Devastated, she leaves home and goes to a seaside town where she hopes to achieve a measure of calm. As she grapples with her dilemmas about the future of her marriage and the lingering trauma of her past, Urmi finds herself plunging into an affair with a much younger man. Set in Kolkata and a small town by the sea, The Sea Has the Answers is the layered story of a woman’s search for self-realisation and the rekindling of her sexuality after her husband has been outed as a #MeToo perpetrator. It also delves into the psyche of a powerful man who stands exposed as a sex offender, and throws light on some of the grey areas around ‘consent’. Narrated in vibrant, often lyrical, prose, the novel is a nuanced exploration of power and its abuse, misogyny and sexual violence, faith and betrayal, self-deception and the many shades of truth—all of which play out against the backdrop of some of the most burning social realities of contemporary India. . About the Author: Shuma Raha is a Delhi-based writer and author of two critically acclaimed works of fiction, The Love Song of Maya K and Other Stories (Niyogi Books, 2018) and The Swap (HarperCollins, 2019), a novel. Earlier, she worked as a journalist in senior editorial roles at The Telegraph and The Times of India. While pursuing her career as a writer of fiction, Shuma continues to practise journalism and contributes columns to several publications on issues of gender, media, politics and culture. Read more