a memoir of lineage, faith, and returning home
a memoir of lineage, faith, and returning home
(Forthcoming)
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Some stories do not end. They continue.
In 1745, an ancestor pitched a tent on barren land in Punjab and built what would become Pothi Mala — a two-story haveli housing over five hundred murals and a collection of sacred Sikh relics, entrusted to one family's keeping across seventeen generations. Ruby Sodhi was born into that family. The Path Seeker is the first English-language memoir written from inside the Sodhi lineage — and the story only she can tell.
About the Book
The Path Seeker: A Memoir of Lineage, Faith, and Returning Home moves across three centuries and two continents, tracing one woman's journey from the sacred courtyards of Pothi Mala in Punjab to the institutions and classrooms of California — and back again.
At its historical center is Bibi Bhani, wife of Guru Ram Das and daughter of Guru Amar Das, the third Sikh Guru, whose prayer to her father changed the nature of Sikh sacred succession itself. Bibi Bhani shaped the direction of one of the world's great faiths. What history preserved of her passed through institutional hands. What the lineage preserved of her passed through women.
The memoir unfolds in three movements — Roots, Passage, and Return. It begins in the courtyards of Pothi Mala, where the narrator learns to read devotion and gendered constraint side by side, where sealed doors conceal murals depicting Hindu and Sikh epics and Punjabi folk traditions, forming a rare monument to interfaith coexistence. It follows her departure through boarding school in the Himalayas, the anti-Sikh violence of 1984, migration to the United States, and two decades in education and advocacy — including a painful betrayal that forced a reckoning and the recovery of her voice. It returns, finally, to a home she must learn to see differently.
There, inheritance reveals itself not as relics or titles, but as the unrecorded lives of the women who sustained both.
They did not survive history. They survived in her.
Why This Book, Why Now
Pothi Mala is deteriorating.
Its murals — painted by artists of multiple faiths in a rare monument to Hindu-Sikh coexistence — are among India's most significant unprotected heritage sites. Some roofs have caved in. Some pigments have turned to dust. The systems meant to protect it have failed.
At the same time, the Sikh diaspora in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada is substantial, culturally engaged, and hungry for literary representations of its history that go beyond familiar narratives of partition and immigration. The Path Seeker offers something that has not existed before in English: a first-person account from inside one of Sikhism's most significant lineages, written by a woman who inherited its silences alongside its sacred objects.
This is also a book about what it costs to be a woman in a world that favors men — and the quiet realization that everything she needed was always within reach, beyond titles, heritage, or prescribed roles.
In a literary moment when women's voices from historically marginalized traditions are finally finding the readership they deserve, The Path Seeker arrives with a story no one has told before.
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