The Forbidden Letters

By Hemu Aggarwal

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Rigid norms and rules in some cultures suffocate the lives of young people. The book highlights such regulations and their consequences and shows how one young couple subjected to such norms eventually breaks away from them and allows their children to grow unfettered by them. The book includes 216 of the 500 century-old letters found in an attic. It tells the story of a young couple’s life, married when they were still teenagers, but lived apart intermittently for eight years. The letters describe their love for each other, the agony of separation, taboos of the times, and the hardships endured by women in a joint-family system. The book also describes the couple’s encounter with deadly diseases and the unwanted adoption of their child by another family. Crossing cultural, country, gender, and age boundaries, you take on a tumultuous 100-year journey from India to America, shedding the shackles of a joint family and allowing the next generation the freedom to chart their destinies. This story of the book crosses the boundaries of CULTURES (Eastern to Western), COUNTRIES (India to America), and CENTURIES (20th to 21st). A hundred-year journey – 1922 to 2022.

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