Sari on the Snow launched

Shashi Kaila’s Sari on the Snow launched to a standing-room only crowd at the Strathcona Seniors Centre today. This is the story of a couple from India making a home in northern Alberta in the ’60s. It is a story of community and challenge, adjustment and courage.

Stories like this broaden our vision and create understanding. Audra Hollingshead shared her experience working with the project and Shashi:

“As I read and worked with Shashi on her story something happened to me. I walked in Shashi’s footsteps. I became more aware, more consciously accepting, more tolerant. I became more loving.

“Back on the day that the fates decreed that Shashi would – through an arranged marriage – hitch her future to an itinerant dreamer of a school teacher, from hot spot India, little did she know she would become the snow-shoe Princess of her own reality show. With little other than a travel bag filled with whispy silk saris, and a tiny baby, she headed out to something of which she had no concept – the frozen wilderness of Canada’s North.

“Like our prairie pioneers, Shashi had but two choices. Madness or survival. Shashi is a survivor. She has spirit… that nebulous thing around which you cannot tie a red thread and call it ‘brother’. It is the kind of spirit of our pioneer ancestors. That unshakeable will that built this vast country.

“This week we have the unveiling of a beautiful life story.

“I salute this author. One of the finest people to foster unity in our great Canada. I salute too, Shashi’s Prem for without his initial bout of insanity in coming to a frozen lake in the middle of nowhere to teach the three “R’s”, none of this ever would have happened, and we would have been the poorer for it.

“This is a great book for book clubs. It fosters many questions. Questions about not only the author, her culture and her indomitable will, it fosters also questions about ourselves.”

Publication assistance and printing for “Sari on the Snow” was provided in Edmonton by PageMaster. It is available at our location, on-line at PageMasterPulishing.ca and is listed on Bookmanager for independent bookstores to order.