What happens when the people who claim to love you are also the ones determined to destroy you? In Welcome Home, Mariam by Sanchita Mitra, a young woman’s struggle to recover her identity becomes a disturbing exploration of parental abuse, communal complicity, and the terrible cost of belonging to a place that values its own prosperity more than the life of one of its children. Mitra builds an atmosphere of creeping dread around a mystery that initially offers several possible explanations, though the novel’s eventual revelations lose some of their impact beneath an overabundance of exposition.
When Mariam is found alone in a vandalized apartment with no memory of who she is or how she arrived there, she is returned to her childhood home and placed in the care of a couple who insist they are her parents. Although she cannot remember them, they seem to have no trouble recognizing the daughter they expect her to be. The same is true of the townspeople, who greet Mariam’s return with an enthusiasm that feels increasingly difficult to explain. Her bedroom has been preserved as though time stopped in her absence, while her own mind offers no reliable connection to the girl who once occupied it. As hallucinations intrude upon her waking hours and sleepwalking leaves her increasingly vulnerable, Mariam finds herself trapped in a home where everyone insists she is safe, even as her condition deteriorates. The more desperately she tries to understand what has happened to her, the more threatening her surroundings become.
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