The Walrus magazine posted an excerpt of a new memoir by School of Environmental Sciences professor Madhur Anand.

This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart, published on June 30, tells the stories of Anand’s parents, their tale of immigration after the partition of Pakistan from India and how their experiences affected their daughter.

The book has two covers: read it one way and the story is told from the perspective of Anand’s parents; turn it upside down and it’s Anand’s voice as the daughter of immigrants.

As Anand told The Walrus, she had intended only to tell the stories of my parents’ lives and of some other people in their generation.

“But, in writing their stories, I realized very quickly that I could not tell their stories in the third person and be done with it. I felt I had to inhabit their worlds, to wear their clothes, to walk in their shoes, to imagine their thoughts, to read their books (quantum physics in the case of my father, ESL books in the case of my mother). I had to become them. I had to write ‘I.’”

Anand is a professor and director of the Global Ecological Change and Sustainability lab at U of G. She is also a poet and author of the collection A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes.