‘The heart asks pleasure first’ by Karuna Ezara Parikh is her first debut book. It is a tale of love, friendship, and separation that will leave you in shock at the end.
The story revolves around Daya, a ballet student in Wales far away from her home in India. Unexpectedly, she meets the love of her life Aaftab, a young Muslim lawyer from Pakistan, and falls inexplicably in love with him. Their relationship transcends the dishes of religion, nationality, and language. This hypnotic and breathtaking love story of Daya and Aaftab will make you fall in love, cry, and yearn for love and friendship. The characters are beautifully sketched, each one has a gripping story to tell. Wasim, Gyan, and Asha will stun you through their stories of love and understanding.
When I first started reading this, I was hooked onto it like a honey-bee sucking onto a flower’s nectar. This book breathes a new life into the one who grabs the opportunity of reading it. To start with, this book had me in tears till the very last page. Do you want to know why? This book is something every reader wishes to read, a book so enchanting, so captivating and so hypnotic that every single line of this book casts a spell on your soul. To Daya, Aaftab, Wasim, Gyan, Asha, Colin who will forever stay my favorite characters that too sketched so deeply word to word will melt your heart and sometimes the descriptions will break you too. Wasim, who was such a warm soul, speaking a language of his own he won my heart and subtly made me laugh, in the end, the battle between what he wanted to do and what he did broke my heart and a teardrop fell from my eyes which was almost hypnotic as I did not stop reading this book, not even for a while. It took a day and a half to complete this tale of love, separation, friendship, and magic. All that a reader finds pleasure in, is in this one book.
While feeling an ache in my heart, I sat down and wrote lines from this book which I loved the most, nothing that I did not fall for.
“For what is love but the ability of humans to both mirror and reflect?”
Aaftab-“They would not be able to see past her teardrop breast to her massive heart”
“Every time we made love, we’re straying across a border’ And he replied,” No, Daya. We’re rejoining lands”
The best I have read so far. A reader’s dream has come true through this nostalgic yet electrifying tale of love.
-Review by Sherry Christina George
