Traditional brahmin households juxtaposed with brothels; a tapestry of history and philosophy, the gossip of the ignorant and the wisdom of the learned: all these go to make this extraordinary story of Saraswati, a remarkable Indian woman. She has had downs - she began with one. She wasn't her mother's favourite child; nor her father's for that matter. They simply had too many kids and their love was spread thin. Then, Saraswati got married. It was sheer serendipity: a husband after her heart in a house that gave her so much space to think, to learn, to know. But then, her husband died. Saraswati had become a child-widow: married at eleven and widowed at fifteen, in a society that didn't look kindly upon women who had lost their husbands.

You wouldn't believe that brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles can be so cruel. But they can be, they are. Saraswati, widowed and orphaned as well, is abused by close relatives in her maternal home, and molested by an uncle she loved like a father. This despite the fact that she is a new mother. Hers could have been the story of so many other Indian women who had been married and widowed before they were out of their teens. But Saraswati chose to be different. She took the road less travelled by.

For a while, all is smooth sailing. But the calm is deceptive. At the pinnacle of her achievement Saraswati stumbles. A momentary aberration comes back to haunt her. The public is quick to denounce her, tear her life’s work to shreds. What is the reaction of those whose lives she has touched? Are they too against her? What keeps her from crumbling when she has lost everything, almost? How does Saraswati cope despite a string of disasters marking the journey that is her life? This is what the novel goes on to discover.

But WILL SHALL OVERCOME is not just about one woman. It is also a novel about ordinary people -- the good, the bad, and the suffering -- whose lives overlap with Saraswati’s and define the remarkable journey that is her own life.

The warp and weft of a culture, a nation, overlap and merge to produce a distinctive design. Though the eye may perceive only the dominant image or images, no part of the design is inconsequential. This is what I feel strongly and this is the spirit that has guided this story of Saraswati, which I hope will live with you long after you have laid down the book.

[Note: A previous edition of the book was published under the title 'A Journey, A Life: Saraswati's Story']