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Even though Seven is overly long, quite “chick-litty��, and characterized by a fair bit of Hindi and Arabic vocabulary, it’s a readable novel. It focuses on the practice of khatna (female circumcision/genital mutilation) in the Dawoodi Bohra community, a sect of Shia Islam, about which I admit to having known nothing before reading Farzana Doctor’s book. Khatna is typically performed on female children when they are seven years old. It is said to maintain girls�� “purity�� and reduce the likelihood of their acting out sexually. Some who undergo the procedure experience no diminishment in feeling, but for others there is nerve damage, causing loss of normal sensation or even significant pain. Trauma is not uncommon. Girls are usually not told what is being done to them. Afterwards, they are instructed not to discuss what they’ve been through.

Set in 2015, the novel centres on Sharifa, a 40-year-old New Yorker, who in childhood immigrated to the U.S. with her parents. Now, years later, she’s burnt out from fifteen years as a high-school history teacher. She resigns from her job in order to travel with her Canadian-born Bohra husband, Murtuza, and their seven-year-old daughter, Zee, to Mumbai. Murtuza will be teaching a course while on sabbatical there. Sharifa’s affluent Indian cousins have arranged luxurious accommodations for her family’s eight-month stay.

Before Sharifa leaves the U.S., her recently widowed mother encourages her to put her training as a historian to use in India by doing some research on the family patriarch, Abdoolally Seth, her great-great-grandfather. When Abdoolally was a child, he and his mother, Amtabai, left Dholka, their small Gujarati village, to make their way in Mumbai. Amtabai’s instincts were good ones: Abdoolally’s would be the quintessential rags-to-riches story. He started as an illiterate boy in servitude to others and became an extremely wealthy and influential businessman—and one with a conscience to boot. He bequeathed two-thirds of his riches to charity for the establishment of Bohra schools and a maternity hospital in his home village. The first two of the patriarch’s young wives had died in childbirth; his losing them left a permanent mark. He married his fourth wife, the homely widow of a loyal employee, as a good deed. However, it’s the third wife, Zehra, who captures Sharifa’s imagination. For some mysterious reason, Abdoolally divorced the young woman after only two years of marriage, something almost unheard of in the Bohra community of the early twentieth century. Sharifa aims to get to the bottom of Zehra’s story, and, indeed, by the end of the book, she does.

Once in India, Sharifa spends lots of time with her cousins, Zainab and Fatema. The three, who are the same age, had been inseparable as children. Fatema is a wealthy businesswoman who owns a successful publishing house. She’s also a committed feminist and social activist, critical of the corruption and misogyny in the Bohra community, and particularly angry about khatna. This is a practice decreed by the male leaders of the sect, but enforced and carried out by its women. Fatema collects and posts the stories of khatna survivors on her Facebook page, but she, too, has been personally touched and harmed by the rite. She challenges Sharifa to think about what she’d rather avoid and makes some shocking disclosures. (view spoiler)[Fatema reveals that when they were seven, the girls�� Aunt Tasnim took all three of them—including Sharifa, who was visiting for the summer—to be “cut��. The act was carried out in violation of Sharifa’s mother’s stated instructions. Zainab suffered only minimally, but both Fatema and Sharifa experienced nerve injury and lost normal sensation. While Fatema has clear recall of that day 33 years before, the event was so traumatic for Sharifa that she buried all memory of it. She initially reacts to Fatema’s words by denying the harm that was done to her and the degree the procedure has affected her life. Ultimately, however, she realizes there’s a physical reason for her inability to derive pleasure from her intimate relations. She is terrified to leave her seven-year-old daughter alone with the once-favourite aunt who robbed her of something so significant. (hide spoiler)]

Seven is an interesting novel, rich in anthropological detail about a community I suspect many Westerners are unaware of. The content highlights the importance of halting a barbaric, inhumane practice. I believe this book, like so many other contemporary works of fiction, would have benefited from a rigorous slimming down by at least a third. Sometimes less really is more. The reader doesn’t need to know the menu for every meal, nor the subject matter for every home-schooled lesson Sharifa delivers to Zee while they’re in India. Furthermore, the author seems a lot more interested in detailing aspects of Sharifa and Murtuza’s sex life—including the Fifty-Shades-of-Grey elements—than I was in reading about them. The details are remarkable only for their utter tediousness. They fail to compensate for an often bland, disappointingly passive, and occasionally dim-witted protagonist. (view spoiler)[To wit: in spite of her awareness of the menace Aunt Tasnim poses, Sharifa does not anticipate the woman’s sneakiness—her way of getting at Zee through Zee’s teenage cousin, Nafeesa. (hide spoiler)] However, just when I was losing all faith in Sharifa, she surprised me by quite courageously (for her) confronting the member of her family who’d betrayed her. The novel’s epilogue is also strong. The heartwarming elements of the women buying matching Indian clothes I could have done without.

Thank you to Farzana Doctor, who herself endured khatna, and to Library Thing Early Reviewers program for kindly providing me with a hard copy of the book.