Sohaila Abdulali

Sohaila Abdulali (b. 1963) was born in Bombay. She did her schooling in India, and moved to the US with her family when she was 15.

She got her BA from Brandeis University in Economics and Sociology, and wrote her thesis on the socio-economics of rape in India. she got her Masters in Communication at Stanford University. She worked as a journalist in Philadelphia, Boston and Bombay. Sohaila Abdulali also began her fiction career, and, to support her writing, she did various odd jobs, from working in an independent bookstore, working with mentally ill adults, to doing sleep research in a psychiatric hospital. She moved to Delhi, India, for two years, where she coordinated publicity and publications for Oxfam.

She continues to write and publish both fiction and non-fiction. She lives in the Lower East Side of New York.

Works

• The Madwoman of Jogare {1998}

The Madwoman of Jogare

The Madwoman of Jogare is set in Karjat, Maharashtra. It takes place across three monsoon seasons. It explores the primacy of the soil and the unreasonable emotions it arouses. The book focuses on the life of a young painter and her eccentric orchid-growing Muslim family. The local villagers, Hindu and tribal, are main characters in the story, as are a confused American scholar and an earnest British development worker. There are also arrivals from the city, who threaten to destroy the landscape and pollute the river. The book begins and ends with the local madwoman, who foretells the monsoon each year.