A system of marriage thought to be long extinct by the modern world, still casts its shadows on the life of a contemporary woman living in a world fossilized in the icy world of the Indian Himalayas.

SYNOPSIS

The Brokpa (or Drokpa) are a tribe of herders that live across the pan Himalayan region of Tibet, India and Bhutan. Primarily nomadic, the Brokpa are Yak herders practicing polyandry among male siblings. Lobjang, a Brokpa from Sakteng village of East Bhutan, led a happy life with his beautiful wife Sonam. The only discomfort in their lives was that he was the lone male child of the family without a brother to share his wife with and help him look after his Yaks while he went to distant places for bartering his milk produce against cereals and foodstuff. While others could allow their women to tend to their grazing herd, Lobjang was unable to do so – it was a belief in his family that their household deity would bring bad luck if one did so. So Lobjang and Sonam spent their lives in partial separation, Lobjang occasionally visiting her in the village before departing in search of food from distant agriculturist villages.

Taking advantage of her husband’s long periods of absence, Pema Wangchu started seducing Sonam, and she ultimately succumbed to his overtures. Lobjang protested when he discovered the affair initially, but later decided to take Pema Wangchu as his co-husband. That way, they could share the burden of household. He could spend half of the month in the grazing grounds and the other half at home with Sonam. As such, Pema Wangchu entered Lobjang and Sonam’s life as an exceptional case, because the polyandry system of marriage usually applied only to siblings. Initially, the threesome conjugal life seemed to work perfectly well, but as time passed things started falling apart. Pema Wangchu starts showing his true fallacious character riddled with sloth, defiance and greed. Soon, Sonam found herself sandwiched between two conflicting husbands.

A story of love, intrigue and an arrangement deemed necessary for the pure reason of survival, Sonam is a tragic artwork depicting the fallout of a deemed-to-be-necessary system that rattles the lives of the novel’s protagonists in ways and measures unthinkable in the beginning of the story.