Climbing the Stairs [Paperback]

Read Padma Venkatraman's posts on the Penguin Blog.

Fifteen-year-old Vidya dreams of going to college— an unusual aspiration for a girl living in British occupied India during World War II. Then tragedy strikes, and Vidya and her brother are forced to move into a traditional household with their extended family, where women are meant to be married, not educated. Breaking the rules, Vidya finds refuge in her grandfather’s library. But then her brother does something unthinkable, and Vidya’s life becomes a whirlwind of political and personal complications. The question is, will she be strong enough to survive?

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Padma Venkatraman lives in North Kingstown, Rhode Island. An oceanographer by training, she is the author of twenty books for young readers, published in India, on a variety of subjects. To learn more, about her bookClimbing the Stairs, visit the web site, www.climbingthestairsbook.com. You can also read her blog, padmasbooks.blogspot.com.Chapter 1I still remember the day we celebrated Krishna Jayanthi, the festival of Lord Krishna’s birth, at our home in Bombay. The drive was drenched with the juice of fallenjamunfruit and the sand of Mahim beach gleamed like a golden plate in the afternoon sunlight. Whispers of heat rose from the tar road and shivered toward the slumbering Arabian Sea.I had folded up my ankle-length skirt and was getting ready to climb up the jamun tree. A warm breeze blew around my bare knees. My brother’s brown legs were already wrapped around the roughness of the main trunk, clinging on like a monkey to its mother’s body. Kitta was eighteen and he’d just started college, but though his voice had recently deepened and the first fuzzy promise of a black mustache shadowed his upper lip, he still looked more a boy than a man. Our dog, Raja, was yapping loudly on the ground, wagging his tail.I spread an old rug on the ground beneath thelsW