How It Happened -- review of new book by Shazaf Fatima

On arranged marriages and Shia-Sunni rifts in Pakistan...

http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-literaryreview/living-life-the-arranged-way/article4986492.ece

The Blind Man's Garden by Nadeem Aslam: A Review

Every now and then you read a book that surprises you by its combination of contraries. No matter how rich a lode of raw material a writer may have struck, nor how vast or variegated a canvas he may have appropriated, regardless even of how talented or dedicated he might be, he evokes exasperation rather absorption in his reader. Not consistently, not always but every now and then, sometimes every few pages but enough to make you put down the book, and pick it up again through sheer dint of will power. For, I must confess, were it not for the purpose of writing this review I would have abandoned Nadeem Aslam’s The Blind Man’s Garden after the first 50-odd pages. I must also confess that the loss would have been mine. For all its ponderousness and portentousness, The Blind Man’s Garden, hides within it a story that was waiting to be told.

Shortly after the American bombing of Afghanistan, we had heard of the countless Pakistanis who volunteered to help the victims of the west’s ‘war on terror’; some crossed the porous border into Afghanistan, others flocked to shelters and refugee camps to help the waves of Afghan refugees who sought safe haven on Pakistan soil. But save for stray newspaper reports, largely one-sided depending on where or by whom they were being published,  no substantial account emerged of the compulsions of those who offered help, of what they saw and experienced, let alone the reception they met at the hands of the ‘victims’. In this, his fourth novel, Nadeem Aslam takes off from his previous book, The Wasted Vigil, which had dealt with the depravity and horrors of Taliban territory. In fact, all of Aslam’s literary offering have been marked by the confrontation of the East and the West, the Islamophobia that has gripped the West and the murder and mayhem unleashed by the events of 9/11.

‘History’ is the third parent,’ so begins The Blind Man’s Garden as it sets off to explore the flawed marriage between politics and religion. It is October, a month after the attacks on the Twin Towers. American forces have launched a military offensive; the buildings, orchards and hills of Afghanistan are being bombed, for an aggrieved America has decided that there can be ‘no innocent people in a guilty nation’. Rohan and his son, Jeo, travel from Heer, an imaginary town somewhere in Pakistan, to Peshawar where the wounded and injured are being brought in. Mikal, Rohan’s foster son and the son of Communist arrested and never seen again, is also planning to offer help; while Jeo is a third-year medical student, Mikal works at a gun repair shop where a day after the West invaded Afghanistan a ‘piety discount’ is being offered to those who wish to buy an AK 47 to go to jihad. Jeo and Mikal cross the border and are promptly sold to the Taliban; they find themselves amidst a ragtag army of jihadis from the wider Muslim world: Egyptians, Algerians, Saudis, Yemenis, Uzbeks and Chechens. Jeo is killed shortly thereafter in an American attack on a Taliban fortification and a grievously wounded Mikal taken prisoner by a warlord ‘who cut off the trigger finger on each of his hands and nailed the two pieces to a doorframe along with those taken from dozens of other captives.’

What follows is an unimaginable litany of horrors: A game called ‘Nail’ where a captive is asked his age; if the boy says twelve, he is raped by twelve men, if he says fourteen, then fourteen men are sent to him all of whom keep shouting ‘Nail! Nail! Nail” as they go about brutalising him. Desperate parents of captive boys who sell off a kidney to pay the ransom seekers who may be defeated or banished Taliban, al-Qaeda gangs or rogue warlords.  A room filled with the rubble of the broken Buddha and his companions. A graveyard of vandalised Russian helicopters, MiGs and Hinds covered with lichens. Blood-thirsty bandits bartering their prisoners for ransom, or failing that putting them to hard labour like galley slaves from an ancient age. With all the solemn ponderousness of a church bell, Aslam’s voice pierces through the veils of dispassionate reporting as, for instance, when he observes:

‘The opposite of war is not peace but civilisation, and civilisation is purchased with violence, and cold-blooded murder. With war. The man [a warlord] must earn millions of dollars for guarding the NATO supply convoys as they pass through his area, and for the militia he must have raised to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda soldiers alongside American Special Forces.’

Interspersed with the brutalities of a war-ravaged land and horrifying vignettes of a people desensitised by a relentless, never-ending chaos and carnage, is a tender love-story – between Mikal and Naheed, Jeo’s widow. Mikal, who reminded me constantly of Ayn Rand’s iconic protagonist, Howard Roark, because of his self-destructive idealism, who has come to Afghanistan to fight a holy war, instead finds himself wounded and enslaved, brutalised and humiliated, trapped and sold for $5000 to the Americans. Through a series of incongruous twists and turns – no less incongruous than the war that has devastated countless lives – Mikal rescues an American stranger. In the end, while the American is rescued and spirited away in a Chinook helicopter Mikal’s own fate is left ambiguous. ‘Damaged and scarred, he is still perfect’; he appears as a ghost to convince Naheed, the love of his life, to continue with her life without him. Aslam’s last words are moving and prophetic: ‘The insects weave a gauze of sound in the air. She moves towards him and her eyes are full of a still intensity – as though aware of the unnamed, unseen forces in the world, and attempting in her mind to name and see them.’ Perhaps, it is these unnamed unseen forces that govern history and the complex weave of time and circumstance.

In Good Faith: A Review

While much work has been done on exploring and exposing communalism in India, relatively little attempt has been made to understand its conjoined twin, secularism. Is it because communal forces outweigh secular ones? Or, is it because communally-charged narratives make more compelling reading than the gentler milder cameos that are seen as picturesque and quaint rather than hard-hitting and gritty? Or, is it because, cynical and jaded as we are, we find it difficult to expect words like syncretism, pluralism, tolerance, inter-faith dialogue, to mean anything much as a lived reality?

Saba Naqvi, Political Editor of Outlook, makes a valiant attempt to hold on to her idealism and, in the process, pick clean the tangled skeins of religion, politics and culture. Despite the nature of her work (she has been covering the major political parties) which inevitably breeds cynicism, she explains why it is important for her to believe in an India that is ‘tolerant and safe for all communities, an India that synthesises identities instead of atomising us all into a Hindu atom here, a Muslim particle there, a Christian molecule some distance way, a Sikh on the periphery.’ Giving a glimpse into her own mixed background – with a Shia Muslim father, a Protestant Christian mother and her former husband a Hindu from Bengal – she writes:

‘This is my offering in an age when Hindu majoritarianism is always raising its ugly head, when Islamic puritanism is on the rise across the globe, and when issues of identity still determine our politics.’

The product of several years of journeying into the distant corners of India, In Good Faith brings together the many ‘little cultures’ that have survived – sometimes on the margins of and sometimes cheek by jowl with – the dominant ‘big tradition’. We are familiar with some that pop up as tokens of ethnic chic in cultural festivals and melas: such as the Baul singers and the qawwals, the Manganiyars and Chitrakars. But others are new and startling in their combination of contraries: such as Bonbibi, a Muslim goddess in the Sundarbans or the Sufi saint in the temple town of Trichy.

In Urdu literature, there has always been a tradition of studding abundant and vivid descriptions of composite culture into larger narratives. Many Urdu writers have presented composite culture – referred to commonly as ganga-jamuni tehzeeb -- as an antidote for communalism and other forms of sectarian strife. Naqvi takes us into obscure nooks and crannies to show how widespread this tradition is, how many people have created a space for themselves in the face of an orthodoxy that demands exclusivity and unitarianism. What is more, these essays also show the importance of culture in the daily lived lives of the Indian Muslims and, in the practice of a myriad different rituals and mores, how far removed Indian Islam is from the homogenous monolith of popular imagination.

In picking out the secular thread in the fabric of modern India, Naqvi reminds us of the futility of viewing religion and politics as adversaries. By drawing our attention to those communities and traditions that have successfully countered majoritarianism, she shows us that there is hope, yet. Like a candle in the wind, her book tells us that a belief in pluralism and composite culture is intrinsic to the Indian Muslim ethos. It is challenged day by day, yes, but is not hopelessly eroded yet. The horrific communal violence of the partition, the continuing communal clashes in the decades thereafter, the sense of besiegement and alienation that came in its wake, events triggered by Assam and Kashmir or Ayodhya and Gujarat challenge and occasionally weaken it. Its pattern – sometimes muted, sometimes vibrant – can nevertheless be traced in the many little cultural pockets that survive in the face of all odds. The warp of religious-cultural pluralism and the woof of secularism weave a tapestry that is as richly textured as it is sturdy. In compelling prose, Naqvi plucks these little local pictures from the threat of obscurity and places them for a larger viewership.

Khushwant Singh's New Book: review in The Herald

I must begin this review with a confession: I am an unabashed admirer of Khushwant Singh. I have known him for years and enjoyed many a delightful evening in his cozy flat listening to his yarns and talking about his three great passions: people, poetry and politics. Ensconced in his favourite armchair, his feet atop a cane stool, a fire blazing in the hearth, surrounded by piles of new books gifted to him in equal numbers by aspiring and established authors, he is witty, curious, engaging; in fact, a very far cry from the ‘dirty old man’ of popular imagination. Till his health permitted, he would permit two or three or four (never too many to make a crowd) of his friends and admirers to drop in (always after taking a prior appointment) at a scheduled time (starting from 7.00 pm sharp and ending on the dot of 7.45 as he sits down for his dinner at precisely 8.00 pm). Recent years have seen him retreating from public life and meeting fewer and fewer people; though, as the number of his books continues to grow at a steady pace and his columns continue to appear, the ‘Sardar in the Bulb’ (immortalised by the cartoonist Mario Miranda) continues to light up the life of countless Indians with his deep insight into human nature.

After several best-selling books in a career spanning six decades, comes his newest offering: The Freethinker’s Prayer Book and Some Words to Live By (Aleph, 2012). Only someone who does not believe in God yet recites the Gayatri Mantra without fail when he gets up before dawn every day, who proclaims to be an agnostic yet knows large chunks of the Bible and the Holy Quran by heart, who has consistently tossed his hat at the windmills of the gods yet evidently draws his strength and inspiration from some hidden source somewhere could have written such a book. The words of Mother Teresa, Gandhi, Kabir, Marcus Aurelius, St Thomas Aquinas, Lalan fakir, Shah Abdul Latif and many more merge seamlessly and effortlessly. Prayers and snippets by poets, philosophers and prophets ranging from William Blake to Maulana Rumi to Lao Tsu, passages from religious texts as diverse as the Vedas, Upanishads, Avesta, Granth Sahib, as well as verses from Tagore, Ghalib and Keats make this an eclectic and individualistic culling from a man who has sipped long and deep at the fount of learning. Yet, in a manner typical of Khushwant, he remains characteristically irreverent:

‘Once you have decided not to bow to any gods, and if you have a good bullshit detector, it is possible to separate the sublime from the ridiculous and derive inspiration from the words of prophets and poets, gurus and rogues, grave men and clowns. There is a lot to be learned from both the sacred and the profane. I have done that nearly all my life and put down in my notebooks hundreds of lines from different sources that appealed to me… I offer them to you as life codes from an ancient and unrepentant agnostic. Read them with an open mind and an open heart.’

Justifying this wide-ranging selection, Khushwant concludes thus:

‘Since I am not obliged to hold any scripture as sacrosanct, I think I have been able to cull the valuable and memorable from each holy book, ignoring a lot that is of indifferent literary quality, illogical or contrary to a humane and liberal world view.’

At 97, Khushwant has been saying that it is time for him to hang up his boots and go. But those of us who have grown up on a steady diet of Khushwant Singh’s writings – be they in the form of columns, editorials, translations, book reviews, books of fiction and non-fiction -- can only wish him long life and good health, and say: ‘Allah kare zor-e-qalam aur ziyada…’

Also Read:

1.     Train to Pakistan, Chatto & Windus, 1956: a historical novel that placed Khushwant among the finest chroniclers of the partition

2.     A History of the Sikhs, Princeton University Press, 1963: it established Khushwant’s reputation as a serious, even scholarly, writer.

3.     Sex, Scotch and Scholarship, Harper Collins, 1992: the title says it all; the selection comprises vintage Khushwant with dollops of readability.

Elegy to a vanished world -- review of a new book on Hyderabad

Huma R. Kidwai. The Hussaini Alam House, Zubaan, 2012, p. 213.

Not since Attia Hosain have we had a chronicler of Muslim life in English. There was Anita Desai’s In Custody and Shama Futehally’s delicately nuanced Tara Lane, but such depictions have been few and far between. In mainstream English literature, the Muslim presence has been a shadowy one, occupying the margins of the English readers’ collective consciousness. Considering the largely ecstatic reviews of most recent books dealing with niche communities – be they Parsis or Syrian Christians or Coorgis -- this absence seems remarkable.

Huma R. Kidwai attempts to fill the gap with her story set in a two century-old house in Hyderabad. Once splendid and opulent, the house has fallen on hard times and its occupants – each a living-breathing example of old-world life and manners – carry on in the face of terrible odds but eventually leave or die. The house, empty and forlorn, remains: a mute symbol of all that has been irrevocably lost.  While comparisons are no doubt odious, I must confess I could not but help compare Kidwai’s The Hussaini Alam House with Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column. Both elegies to a vanished world (Hyderabad in one and Lucknow in the other), they reveal how – in the hands of a truly gifted writer – nostalgia can rise above lament and a requiem to a lost childhood need be neither self-indulgent nor morbidly sentimental. What is more, Hosain’s language that carries within it the sheen of burnished gold and the ripples of unexpected eddies and swirls, lifts her story and makes it soar far above the confines of plot and circumstance. Kidwai’s prose, regrettably, does not do so.

Possibly, Kidwai could have been better served with an alert editor. Her publishers have, shockingly, allowed several pages to be replicated in toto and failed to pick the slack: inconsistencies, factual errors, repetitions, discrepancies, echoes and an unfortunate tendency towards adjectival excess, all of which add to the unnecessary flab in the novel. Possibly, with some stringent pruning The Husaini Alam House might have lived up to the expectation it arouses. For, stripped to its bare bones, it has the makings of a saga:  nine-year old Ayman comes to live in a large ramshackle but charming old house; her father is dead and her mother crazed with grief and despair. She is raised by idiosyncratic but loving relatives: Nanima, her great-grandmother who is as loving as she is eccentric; Amma, her grandmother who is wilful and energetic; Mummy, her mother who has abandoned her yet mesmerises with her intelligence and intensity; Khalajaan the epitome of grace under pressure who loves her like a mother; and Aapa, her elder sister who is as temperamental as she is beautiful. The only two men in this household are Bawajaan, her grandfather who takes her into his jealously-guarded male domain and Khalubawa, the exemplar of refinement and quiet fortitude. And then there is the house and the city, both essential to her story, both a prop and an actor in the tableau that forms scenes from her past life, both poised on the brink of change.

Had Kidwai not adopted a documentary-like approach, she might have redeemed the promise that glimmers amidst the pedantry and polemics. The notorious ‘Police Action’ that heralded the break from an aristocratic past; the Progressive Writers’ Movement that flowered on Deccani soil and bore ample fruit in the revolutionary poetry of Makhdum; the tragic decline of Urdu in a State that had once been its greatest repository – all this and more cannot merely be used as picturesque emblems to stud a narrative; each deserves a more nuanced narration, maybe even a novel in itself. And, yet, Kidwai can also catch you unawares with her sharpness and insight. Of her majestic Khalubawa, immensely dignified despite his straightened circumstances, she writes: ‘This very dignity made him utterly vulnerable to the increasing irreverence and mediocrity of a newly-born nation that prided itself in throwing out every symbol of its past, including its refinement.’

Pico Iyer's The Man Within My Head

Some writers have the spirit of a voyeur. Perhaps none exemplified it better than Graham Greene, the British novelist, playwright and critic, who delighted in his lifelong role of the outsider looking in. His characters, like him, are forever wrenched from their moorings, forever on the move in search of new places, themes and people. But everywhere they go, they remain strangers. In a curious case of life imitating art, we have some one like Pico Iyer, a writer and inveterate traveller, finally writing about the man who has lived inside his head, a man who has influenced Iyer’s ouvre in more ways than he can enumerate, a writer with whom he has had a relationship that is almost obsessive-compulsive. From the day Iyer first read Greene as a schoolboy in a tony British boarding school, the theme that dominated Greene’s writings – that of a the perpetual outsider – became, in a sense, his own, too; it has coloured almpst everything Iyer has written.

A regular contributor to the Time magazine as well as author of seven works of non-fiction and two novels, Iyer has travelled extensively across the world. The son of Indian academics Raghavan N. Iyer, an Oxford philosopher and Theosophist and Nandini Nanak Mehta, a religious scholar who taught at California, Iyer grew up shuttling between America and Britain. Now, married to a Japanese woman, he lives in Kyoto. Straddling cultures and civilisations, grappling with notions of self and identity, home and the world, Iyer grew up to become a global citizen. Like values and friendships, ‘home’ for him is both invisible and portable, something he carries with him like an overnight bag, as he has said in an interview. Whether consciously or unconsciously, his life resembles that of the writer who has most influenced him – Graham Greene who was as peripatetic as Iyer has been all his life.

The Man Within My Head is an extended search for similarities. Iyer goes to places that Greene went to, revisits bars, talks to barmen and bargirls, meets people who knew Greene,  in short takes a long walk down the road that Greene walked almost a half century ago. What is more, he reimagines situations, observes scenes straight out of a Greene story, even writes stories Greene might have written! Why would an established and much-feted writer such as Iyer do that? With a lesser literary talent, it might be seen as literary impersonation but not with someone as prodigiously talented and erudite as Iyer.

Possibly, the answer lies deep inside Iyer’s psyche. Greene’s stories of exploration and escape, romance and chivalry at unexpected places and with unexpected people, stories of innocence and pragmatism, faith and doubt, stories of sinners and saints find an echo in Iyer due to the peculiarities of his own upbringing and education. For both Greene and Iyer travel is a way ‘to see more clearly the questions and shadows it is easy to look past at home’.  For both, the human predicament is of abiding interest, as is the ‘possibility of kindness and honesty even in the midst of our confusions and our sins’. Both have a deep-seated, instinctive compassion for ‘wounded, lonely, seared’ mortals. In writing this book (which I must, confess, reminded me in parts of an extended ‘tutorial’, those wordy, prosy long-winded essays we aspired to write back in my days at Miranda House as  a student of literature), Iyer is on a personal odyssey. He could have written a biography if all he wanted was to write about Greene; instead, he has written, what he calls, a ‘counterbiography’. ‘I’m interested in the things that lived inside him,’ Iyer writes. ‘His terrors and obsessions. Not the life, as it were, but what it touched off in the rest of us.’ What emerges from this rambling, reflexive narrative is a realisation: ‘We run and run from who we are – this was Greene’s theme from the beginning – only to discover, of course, that that is precisely what we can never put behind us.’

(This review first appeared in The Herald, Karachi, September 2012)

Also Read:

1.      The Quiet American by Graham Greene (London, Heinemann, 1955), a British and American journalist vie for the attention of a young Vietnamese woman in war-torn Saigon.

2.      Tropical Classical: Essays From Several Directions by Pico Iyer (New York Knopf, 1997),  book reviews and essays on people and places.

3.      The Gentleman in the Parlour by Somerset Maugham (London, Random House, 1930), the master story teller who influenced both Greene and Iyer, at his best while travelling through Ceylon, Rangoon, Mandalay, Bangkok, Cambodia, Saigon, Hongkok and across the pacific.

Kuldip Nayar's Beyond the Lines -- a review

Kuldip Nayar is the grand old man of Indian journalism. His is the classical post-1947 Indian Success Story. He arrived in India, having travelled from his home in Sialkot across the blood-stained plains of Punjab, to build a new life from scratch in a new country. Like countless other sharanarthis (shelter-seekers as they were called in the early days), through dint of sheer hard work and good ol’fashioned salt-of-the-earth ‘Punjabiyat’, call it what you will, he has built a reputation whose cornerstone is honesty and commitment to secularism and peace.

Nayar’s tryst with destiny began at roughly the same time as his new country’s: at the stroke of the midnight hour when the world slept but India awakened to her destiny. His recently released autobiography, Beyond the Lines (Roli, 2012), reveals the highs and lows, the best and the worst, the price and privilege of that historic tryst. Like Nehru, whom he admires, Nayar put his faith in the idea of a secular, socialist republic and a functioning democracy. Over the years, that faith has been shaken, stirred but never shattered. The Emergency declared by Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, tested his belief in the democratic principles enshrined in the Constitution. Jailed for his ant-Indira writings, he recalls with dismay both the excesses of the government and the frailties of politicians and media alike:

 ‘It was shocking to observe the ease with which Indira Gandhi and Sanjay were able to assume control over the entire administrative machinery and the willingness with which officials and other government employees accepted this….It was disappointing…the way the media and more specifically the journalists reacted to the new situation. Nearly all of them caved in, stricken by an epidemic of fear.’

Elsewhere, too, he keeps his sternest words for the media, which is the greatest bugbear of democracy, and also its greatest strength. Stressing the need for every major newspaper to have an ombudsman, he speaks of the need to have internal checks and balances and to constitute a regulatory body such as a Press Commission. Good journalism, he writes, ‘is all about exposing injustice and highlighting heroes regardless of the consequences.’ A popular figure at public sit-ins, marches and demonstrations, Nayar has repeatedly found common cause with those who have suffered victimisation and marginalisation. ‘Injustice still hurts me,’ he notes, ‘just the same way as it did over sixty years ago, and among my very few friends are those who similarly care for the violation of basic values.’

However, the book has courted enough controversy. The Sikhs are up in arms over allegations that Sikh Students’ Union President Bhai Amrik Singh, who died during Operation Blue Star in June 1984, was an 'IB agent (Falcon was his pseudonym)'. The chapter on Punjab has raised a hornet’s nest due to Nayar’s depiction of the role of Dal Khalsa while writing about the genesis of the Punjab problem as well as the charge that Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale was a creation of the then Congress and a genie that escaped from the Congress’s bottle. Similarly, the late Prime Minister Narasimha Rao’s son is issuing vehement denials; Nayar has accused Rao of ‘conniving’ and locking himself up in his room and, apparently, praying when the mosque was being pulled down at Ayodhya in a classic case of Nero playing while Rome burnt.

Coming from the pen of a man whose personal odyssey in the field of Indian journalism has coincided with the nation-building project, this book is a valuable addition to national historiography.

 

(Reviewed for The Herald, Karachi, August 2012)

Cyrus Mistry's Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer

Echoes of a Living Past

Legend has it that sometime in the 10^th century, shiploads of Zoroastrians, fleeing persecution in their native Iran, landed on the coast of Saurashtra in Western India. They met the local king and sought asylum. The king, Jadi Rana, pointed to a tumbler full of milk, indicating thereby that his empire was full to the brim and he had no place for more people. The leader of the strange new people took a pinch of sugar and mixed it with the milk, telling the king that his people would add sweetness to the milk but never let it overflow. And so they stayed, putting down roots, in Sanjan, Variav, Thane, Broach and cities as further afield as Bombay and Karachi. Their women wore saris and spoke Gujarati, the men excelled in trade and commerce with many occupying high posts in government – from Mughal times to colonial to present day. Called Parsi (having come from Persia), they are India’s smallest minority constituting less than 0.02 % of the population. However, being a distinctive community due to their dress, speech, culture, food as well as their visible presence in fields as diverse as law and medicine, politics and industry, arts and cinema, they have a hold on the Indian imagination disproportionate to their actual numbers. Possibly this is to do with the largely stock characters that the Indian film industry has propagated of the Parsi bawa. 

Cinematic representations continue to be unfair in some ways, showing the Parsis as colourful and privileged but also dysfunctional, antsy, idiosyncratic, miserly and querulous; Being Cyrus, Pestonjee and Earth, being recent examples of this brand of cinema verite. On the other hand, a slew of books has provided a corrective and portrayed members of this community in a more realistic manner. Rohinton Mistry, Thrity Umrigar, Sooni Taraporewla, Farrukh Dhondy, Firdaus Kanga and Cyrus Mistry have, in different ways, explored the Parsi psyche but also located them firmly within the mainstream of Indian life. Cyrus Mistry’s latest offering, Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer, shows how the story of a small, marginalised community of untouchables – the khandhias  who bathe and carry corpses to the Towers of Silence – can rise above its time and circumstance and speak of larger, universal concerns.

In speaking of the Khandhias and the terrible humiliation, isolation and segregation they suffer, Mistry not only throws light on this almost invisible sub-group but also weaves a compelling story of love and loss. Phiroze Alchidana, son of a revered priest, falls in love with Sepideh, the daughter of a corpse bearer who lives in the Doongarwaadi atop Malabar Hill. To have Sepideh, he must leave his father’s home, become a khandhia and live the life of a pariah for such is the fear of contamination from the dead and those who handle dead bodies. Sepideh, a fey child-woman who has lived her entire life in the deeply-forested Doongerwaadi, dies a few years after their marriage leaving Alchi to weather the rigidly-enforced isolation as well as take on the might of the powerful Parsi Punchayet.

Running through the warp of Alchi’s benighted love story is the woof of India’s struggle for Independence. Gandhi’s call for Satyagraha finds an echo deep in the khandhias’ disaffected, disgruntled hearts, inspiring them to launch their own peaceful non-cooperation movement, to go on hartal to down tools or, to be precise, not lift corpses, till their demands for more humane working conditions are met. When Gandhi urges the nation in a radio address – ‘The chains of a slave are broken the moment he considers himself a free man’ – his words become a catalyst for change. Part-fiction, part-truth, Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer is a story of courage and hope, a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story of one man and a nation on the high road of history.

(Rakhshanda Jalil blogs at www.hindustaniawaaz-rakhshanda.blogspot.com)

Also Read:

1.     The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie dealing with the rise of a world famous Indian rock star named Ormus Cama, has shades of Freddie Mercury  aka Farrokh Bulsara.

2.     Such a Long Journey by Rohinton Mistry, details the travails of a Parsi family living in Bombay in the 1970s.

3.     The Space between Us by Thrity Umrigar outlines the lives of two women: a privileged Parsi lady and her maid

 This review first appeared in the Herald, Karachi, August 2012

Black Ice by Mahmudul Haque -- a Bangladeshi partition novel

Black Ice, by Mahmudul Haque, Translated by Mahmud Rahman, Harper Perennial, Rs 199, pp. 123+ PS section.

 ‘Everything becomes a story one day.’ So begins the PS section of this Bangladeshi contemporary classic. Its writer, Mahmudul Haque, is credited with fashioning a new idiom and a distinctly modern sensibility in the post-1947 writing coming out from what was once East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh. Haque (1941-2008) belonged to the ‘twice-born generation’, those, that is, who experienced the trauma of birthing a new nation not once but twice over. Moving from Barasat on the outskirts of Calcutta to Dhaka as a small boy, he was assailed by not only new sights and sounds, but an altogether new sensibility. Being slapped by a school teacher for failing to wear the Jinnah cap, he struggled to find meaning in an irrevocably changed world. Later, during the siege and fall of Dhaka in March 1971, he witnessed the looting, killing and destruction that preceded the birth of a new nation that was expected to rise, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the old. Each event, each new phase in his life and his country’s, each new milestone spurred him to write. Everything became a story one day.

Black Ice, first published as Kalo Borof in 1977, is quite evidently the work of a child of the partition. It carries the scars of leaving behind people and places once so dear and familiar but now accessible only in dreams.  The relentless nostalgia of its protagonist, Abdul Khaleq, brings to mind another young man, Zakir, who too had to leave his home in India in search of a new one across the border in Intizar Husain’s seminal work, Basti (written in 1979 but set in 1971 when the war clouds loomed large over the sub-continent). But Mahmudul Haque is not Intizar Husain and Black Ice is not Basti. Despite the detachment of the protagonists, the tone of quiet aloofness of the narrator, the dream-like motifs, the ceaseless journeying into the past, the invoking of an innocent childhood free from bias and fear and the sullying of that innocence, Basti and Black Ice are as unalike as apples and oranges. Black Ice has none of the allegorical richness that leavens Intezar Hussains narrative, nor the directness but haunting simplicity of Husain’s elegant prose. Possibly, there is something about Husain’s prose itself that remains intact and unharmed by translation. Not having read Haque in Bangla, I cannot tell, but I am struck by the comparison and the fact that it is an unfavourable one.

Vanished days never come back and time past is passed forever. While Khaleq, and perhaps Mahmudul Haque himself might acknowledge this, everywhere in Black Ice, the past hangs heavy, threatening to overwhelm the present. Why is this so? The answer is provided partly by Mahmudul Haque himself in an interview with the young Bangladeshi writer, Ahmad Mostofa Kamal, appended at the end of the novel in the PS section. The writer’s mother, he confesses, had not wanted to leave her home outside Calcutta to come to Pakistan; she had, in fact, even begun to build a new house in West Bengal. Her (two previous) visits to Dhaka had led her to conclude that only barbarians lived there, for she had seen no women moving about in public and, in her opinion, a place where women were not allowed to move freely could only be inhabited by barbarians. Yet, the communal tensions grew to such an extent and it became difficult to even step out of her home that she was forced to move to the new Muslim homeland with her children, leaving a part of their being behind. Decades later, while ostensibly claiming that there can be no love for ‘a birthplace that forces its children to leave’, Haque breaks down and his voice ‘cracks with anguish’. The hurt, evidently, is too deep. In Intezar Hussain, there is no hurt; just a bewilderment that something as grotesque as the partition happened. Round and round, like a kite with a cut string, Husain’s story drifts and soars, backwards and forwards, flitting between then and now but with no trace of bitterness.

Khaleq, a teacher in a mofussil town, finds time hanging heavy on his hands as he copes with the ennui of living in the backwaters and coping with the harangues of a demanding wife. He sits down to write about his life, especially his childhood. He remembers Puti, the girl who spoke to fish and birds, his friends Jhumi and Pachu, the vendors who came by selling shonpapri and dalpapri, the Hindu neighbor who bought him roshmonjori and pantua, his elder brother Moni Bhaijaan who loved Chhobi  Di and had left, taking with him her ribbon as a keepsake, promising to return but never did. Khaleq remembers, also, leaving his home in West Bengal, taking a ferry, setting off on a hijrat to a new land when life became impossibly fraught in the old one.

Years later, travelling with his wife deep into the countryside, he revisits Louhojong, the spot where he had boarded the ferry and is reminded yet again of that fateful night of migration:

Everything becomes a story one day. Louhojong, Louhojong! For the first time in his life, that cry had pierced his ears in the deep of the night. Beside him stood Moni Bhaijaan, in his pocket a ribbon, on the ribbon the fragrance of hair, in the fragrance such sorrow, in the sorrow so much love, in the love so much of their childhood.

In the PS section, Haque recalls how Bikrampur, beside the Buriganga, fascinated him. When the monsoons flooded the low-lying plains and the river became a vast expanse of glimmering water, he would take long boat trips down the river, exploring nooks and corners of the lush countryside. His friendship with boatmen, sharing their simple but delicious meals, meeting people who travelled from one house to another by boat, as well as the lush green forested hamlets beside the river soon became a recurring motif in his novels. In Black Ice, the area around Ichapura appears as a fantasy world, an escape from the rigours of a humdrum meaningless life. The doctor with whom he took some of these boat trips, appears as Doctor Narhari, the conscientious, hard-working country doctor, an idealized yet human figure.

Khaleq is able to find intellectual companionship in his adult life;the emotional connection with people and places, however, seems to be missing. The generosity and wisdom, the freedom and innocence, the pluralism and syncretism of his childhood was destroyed, forever, by the partition. What came in its place – aloofness and rootlessness – is the only legacy for these midnight’s children. Boat rides on the river allow an occasional escape but not a return; there is no going back, at least not for ever. The only certainty, Black Ice seems to be suggesting, is hopelessness and alienation.

Masooma by ismat Chughtai -- a review

Masooma: A Novel, Ismat Chughtai, Translated from the original Urdu by Tahira Naqvi, Women Unlimited, 2011, pp. 143, Rs250.

Squeamish readers would do well to stay away from Masooma, for this book was not written for the faint hearted. Its writer, Ismat Chughtai, never one to pull her punches, is out to draw blood. The wit and gentle humour of earlier stories, the ones based on her experiences in Aligarh and the smaller provincial towns of Upper India, is entirely missing here. A gritty anger and a biting realism combine with a keen eye for detail to depict not merely the dark underbelly of Bombay (as it was then called) but also scratch the mask of sharif culture and expose its desperate poverty.

Ismat wrote voluminously till she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease in 1988. Her formidable body of work comprises several collections of short stories, novels, sketches, plays, reportage, radio plays as well as stories, dialogues and scenarios for the films produced by her husband Shahid Lateef as well as others. Much of her non-film writing was autobiographical; if not directly related to her own life, it certainly stemmed from her own experiences as a woman, especially a middle-class Muslim woman. Some critics, like Aziz Ahmed, have viewed this as a flaw rather than strength, objecting to the constant, overwhelming presence of Ismat herself in all that she wrote.  Regardless of Ismat’s own larger-than-life persona, while it is true that her interest was primarily in women, it is also true that she saw women in the larger social context and not merely within the confines of the zenana. She wrote stories (such as Jadein) and plays (Dhaani Bankein) on other issues such as communal tensions, issues that did not concern women alone, but issues that can be viewed from a unique perspective because they come from a woman’s pen.

Like many of her fellow-travellers in the progressive writers’ movement, Ismat proved over and over again that she was a progressive more by inclination than indoctrination. We see evidence of this in almost her writings; in Masooma too we see Ismat depicting the effects of a world cleft by social and economic injustices upon the life of a young girl. The trade of women and the commodification of a woman’s body, she seems to be saying here, is a direct consequence of human frailty and lust but also of poverty and inequality.

However, Masooma – written in 1962 when the influence of progressivism had considerably waned and the core group within the PWA no longer held its members in thrall -- differs from her other writings in several notable respects. One, the overwhelming presence of Ismat herself – noticeable in her early works – is absent here. Yes, she draws upon her experiences in the film industry; yes, her impressions are refracted through the prism of her own experience; and yes, she continues to be more interested in women than in men. But here, she has managed to camouflage her presence. The story of Masooma, a girl from a wealthy and respectable family from the erstwhile state of Hyderabad, takes centre stage. Also, in the telling of this story of a girl’s descent into prostitution, how innocent Masooma is sold by her aristocratic mother to keep the home fires burning and how this girl from a decent family turns into Nilofer, a mistress who changes hands till she becomes no better (or worse) than a common prostitute, and her mother too is transformed from a haughty begum to a seasoned madam, Ismat sheds her coyness and her tendency to use allusion rather overt descriptions.

While Ismat had always written bold stories that challenged traditional morality and worn-out notions of a woman’s ‘place’ in society, till Masooma she had not written anything that can be described as overly ‘sexual’ – not even in Lihaaf. Given her interest in sexual matters, and the fact that both she and the original bête noir of Urdu – Manto – had been hauled up by a Court in Lahore on charges of obscenity, comparisons between the two have always been inevitable. Noted writer and critic Intezar Husain has drawn an interesting parallel between these two enfant terribles of the Urdu short story:

‘Where Ismat moves away lightly after making a passing reference to (such) a subject, Manto is like the naughty boy who flings open the door, claps his hands and say, ‘Aha! I have seen you!’

In Masooma, Ismat is flinging open that door with a vengeance. We have far more references to ‘such subjects’ here than in any of Ismat’s other works. If anything, we see an Ismat deriving an almost vicarious pleasure when she depicts the debasement and moral descent of Masooma, with insouciant references to trysts in seedy hotels where people watch French films and perform unimaginable acts of abomination! The incorrigible gossip in Ismat causes her to leaven her narrative with generous dollops of spicy snippets about real film stars and real events. Having worked in the film industry herself and known at first hand the seedy goings on between needy starlets and avaricious hangers-on and the unsavoury nexus between producers, directors, financiers, she flavours her story with a robust realism.

‘What a strange place this world is!’ she mock sighs and then embarks upon a rambling digression about Mazhar, the son of a degenerate nawab who, like so many other young men and women with stardust in their eyes, had flocked to Bombay but with his money robbed and youth faded is now a peddler of young girls, supplier of every whim, ‘indentured to the fancies of an ageing heroine’. Somewhere, this seemingly rambling tale hides a stinging observation, sharper than the sting on a scorpion’s tail:

‘When someone who has been the object of toadyism himself has to turn around and become a toady, then there’s no more to be said. He was now well versed in the subtle craft of toadyism.’

And, elsewhere, the mock-sermonising hides a sardonic realism:

‘So many avatars and prophets struggled, lost, and relinquished their lives while trying to teach lessons of goodness; evil is interesting and exciting while goodness is like chewing tough metallic marbles…But this was not the fault of evil or goodness. The fault lay with the artificial society in which she had been raised. There was fasting, namaz, Haj, and zakat – but there was also whoring and vice carried out in secrecy.’

Ismat’s language – always her strength as a story teller – is different too in this novel. Here, she uses biting satire as a tool to sharpen her depiction of social realities and give an extra edge to her pithy, flavoursome, idiomatic language, the begumaati zuban that she herself knew so well. In her hands, Urdu had acquired a new zest, a special zing that made it more readable than ever before; in Masooma she shows how it is also better equipped to reflect new concerns, concerns that had been hitherto considered beyond the pale of literature. Also, her Urdu is full-bodied and vigorous, redolent with the flavours of Bombay, its sights, smells, sounds so different from the genteel world of chaste Urdu speakers of Upper India.

As we witness a revival of interest in Ismat with several translations into English crowding our shelves, we must pause to take note of the translator’s role in the continued popularity of a writer. Ismat is particularly blessed in having in Tahira Naqvi a devoted and able translator. With several Ismat translations behind her, Naqvi is emerging as the most faithful voice for Ismat in English.

This review was published in The Biblio, May-June 2012, New Delhi.

Fatty -- A Biography of Zohra Segal

Sometime in the year 1361 a Jew from Afghanistan, named Quais, travelled to Medina. There, he converted to Islam and began to call himself Abdul Rasheed Quais. A couple of centuries later, his family settled in the area of Roh in the North West Frontier Province. Known as Rohilla Pathans, they eventually made Rampur, a princely estate in the United Provinces, their home. Zohra Segal, veteran film and theatre actor and dancer, traces her lineage to Abdul Rasheed Quais; she attributes her kanjoosi (miserliness) to his being a Jew and her stubbornness and courage to the pure Rohilla blood flowing in her veins! An affectionate – and astonishing candid – biography by her daughter, Kiran Segal, brought out by Niyogi Books to coincide with Zohra Apa’s 100^th birthday tells us all this, and much more.

Called Fatty, the title is an instant giveaway, as is the cover photograph showing the actor (in the role of Mrs Pong in the film The Primary English Class) poised to deliver a karate chop! Clearly, this will be no hagiographical account, no loving but earnest tribute by a doting daughter, no rose-tinted view of an extraordinary life, no soft-focus portrait of a stage and cinema thespian. Kiran is an especially gifted dancer and a Padma Shri awardee, but she is not a writer. She admits as much early on. But by virtue of having a ringside view of her mother’s life and having chosen to live with her for much of her adult life (in a ménage a quartet along with her daughter and her daughter’s daughter, i.e. four generations under one roof), she is also uniquely placed to write about the many ups and downs in her mother’s life, her quirks and eccentricities, her struggles and tragedies, her moods, in short all it takes to make her tick. There is empathy, yes in this telling of a mother’s life by a daughter; there is ample love, too; but Fatty makes no attempt at glorification. The portrait that emerges from the daughter’s pen is not of Saint Zohra but of Mother Courage meets Ma Baker. But then, surely, you can expect no less of someone who called her father Dost and her mother Fatty.

Told in a fairly chronological fashion, the book traverses Zohra Apa’s roots in Rampur, her education at Saint Mary’s Convent in Lahore, and the fact that her schooling and upbringing were such that she became ‘nothing but an Anglicised snob; even now she dreams in English!’ The years with Uday Shankar’s dance Academy in Almora and subsequently with Prithviraj Kapoor’s Prithvi Theatre in Bombay are accompanied by rare photographs, making an era come to life. Dressed in stylish sleeveless blouses and exquisite handloom saris, the two sisters, Zohra and Uzra, appear in these pages like two resplendent creatures. Bohemian yet khandani, culturally rooted to India yet global citizens, they travelled the world and lived life according to their terms all through the 1930s and 40s. Much of Fatty covers similar ground covered by Zohra Apa herself in her autobiography, Close-Up: Memoirs of a Life on Stage and screen (Women Unlimited, 2010). Taken together, we get a portrait in different stages of its making: of An Artist as a Young Woman; Glory Days of Dance and Travel; Personal Tragedy followed by Long Years of Struggle; and now the Lioness in Winter. The indomitable courage to go on, the impishness of youth after a life spanning a century, the perseverance and long hours of daily practice all this combine to make Zohra Segal what she is.

For all the fame and accolades that she now enjoys, Zohra Apa is no stranger to tragedy and hard times. First, there was the Partition that split her family, with most of her siblings choosing to go to Pakistan, including her younger sister, Uzra who had travelled the world with her during her days with the Ravi Shankar Academy and later with Prithvi Theatre. The elder sister, Hajra Begum, a member of the Communist party of India and married to Dr Z A Ahmed stayed back, as did Zohra. But by post-partition, the Glory days of dance and travelling theatre were over. After Zohra Apa’s husband, Kameshwar Segal, a talented painter, actor, dancer and set designer committed suicide in 1959, Zohra Apa moved to Delhi to teach dance at the Delhi Natya Academy. In 1962, she moved to London and took whatever work was available to fend for herself and her two young children. These were years of hard work for little rewards. Zohra Apa recalls these years in her autobiography with not a trace of bitterness; if anything she wears them as a badge of courage and endurance. To sustain herself and her two small children, she took whatever work that came her way in London, including that of a dresser at the Old Vic. With great good cheer, she records the time when she accepted her first tip from an actor she was helping dress:

‘All the Nawabs of Rampur and Najibabad must have turned in their graves that night! And yet, later, I began to look forward to the extra odd pound per week and even enjoyed the sensation of guilt which this recently acquired vice induced!’

Stardom eventually came her way and fame nudged her out of the drudgery of backstage work when a string of roles in mainstream English films and television series began to come her way. Her role as Lady Lili Chatterjee in Jewel in the Crown was followed by the hugely popular Tandoori Nights on BBC. Now, of course she is used to sharing screen space with the leading actors of the Hindi film industry: Amitabh Bachchan, Aishwarya rai, Salman Khan, Preity Zinta, et al.

Fatty’s real strength lies not in its narration of the facts of Zohra Segal’s life, many of which have been narrated with equal fidelity to detail by Zohra Apa herself. I think where Fatty scores is in its author’s candidness. Here’s a sampler:

On her mother’s incorrigible flirtatiousness, Kiran writes:

‘Even now when she is flirting or being naughty with the opposite sex, I cringe; my brother and I really suffer! Had I not been her daughter, I would have also enjoyed her comments, like everyone else. But, being her daughter, I just can’t and very often when she is uttering these embarrassing comments to an interviewer, if I am in the same room, I just walk out.’

And elsewhere:

‘Ammi is just like a child at times. You’ve got to see her when guests are at home and she has dressed herself in a new outfit…She actually comes down the stairs as though she is making an entry on stage and laps up all the praise when her presence, outfit, and so on are admired with ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’! Not one for being shy, she can easily talk to anyone if she wants to and also snub anyone if she is not interested – something which I can never do!’

And:

‘Ammi has two very bad habits – one is blowing her nose at the dining table and the second one is when she does not let you even sit down and take a breather when you come home. She starts straighaway with whatever has to be done, or any message that has to be given!’

Having had the opportunity to meet Zohra Apa on several occasions and to invite her for some of the programmes organised by me for Hindustani Awaaz, I have always wondered at her amazing youthfulness and vitality. Kiran’s book reveals the secret: a disciplined life with large doses of hard work and good humour. On her hundredth birthday, we can only say: ‘Here’s looking at you, Zohra Apa! Salut!’

Scent in an Islamic Garden

‘Scent is the food of the soul, and the soul is the vehicle of the faculties of man.’

--Hadith attributed to the Prophet of Islam

One has heard of literary history, social history, to some extent even economic history culled from literary sources but seldom a horticultural study based on literary texts. Ali Akbar Husain, an architect and a teacher of architectural studies undertakes this novel venture. The result is a delightful pot pourrie of disciplines: history, architecture, landscaping, poetry, horticulture and, given the context, Islam. Scent in an Islamic Garden: A Study of Literary Sources in Persian and Urdu is a remarkable book for another reason, too. It focuses scholarly attention on a largely neglected part of Islamic India: the Deccan.

 

William Dalrymple, writing the Introduction to the book, rightly notes:

‘By any standard, anywhere in the world, the Deccani civilisation that reached its most remarkable flowering in sixteenth century Hyderabad was rich and remarkable. Yet it remains astonishingly little studied. So dominant are the Mughals in the historical memory of India, that the different Deccani sultanates have been almost completely forgotten outside a small group of specialists and scholars. Almost all visitors to India visit the Taj Mahal and learn about Shah Jahan, but few visit Bijapur, Bidar, or even Golconda, and fewer still read of the no less remarkable doings of Adil Shahi and Qutb Shahi sultans.’

In setting out to correct an old wrong, Ali Akbar Husain not merely brings to life the architecture, culture and contribution of the Deccani sultans but also places before us the significance of the garden in the current of Islamic thought. An earthly analogue for the life in paradise that awaits the Momin, the garden is a recurring image in the Holy Quran. The Paradisal Garden, the promised abode of the true believer, known by different names such as Iram, Firdaus, Jannah, is none other than the primordial garden that Man lost through sin but whose image is recoverable from the anima mundi. Descriptions of fair maidens, immortal youths, gushing fountains of cool waters, trees laden with fruit, gentle hills beneath which rivers flow – evoke not only  images of plenitude and freedom from want but also of shade and rest and reward.

Over time, these images acquired near-mythic proportions and found reflection in different art forms in different parts of the Islamic world. The gated gardens of Cordova and Moorish Spain, the funerary gardens centred round a tomb or mausoleum of the Mughals, the classic formalism of the char bagh (the four waterways representing milk, honey, wine and water) and the intricately-worked pavilions and fountains of Andalusia – each has sought to replicate an imagined space, each has introduced local elements be it in the choice of plants or the demands of topography and landscaping.

In the crucible of the Deccan, we find a strange experiment taking place. An intermingling of Hindu elements with Islamic motifs, an admixture of Hindu art with Islamic architecture, an overlay of a Persian mizaj over an intrinsically Indian design sensibility combined to create an exuberant Indo-Islamic atelier. The forts, tombs, palaces and pavilions dotted across Hyderabad, Golconda, Bijapur, Bidar, etc. bear ample testimony to this synergistic flowering. And the gardens surrounding this built heritage were splendid examples of private and public spaces. Since most of these gardens have disappeared in the maw of urbanisation, what remains are references to them in Persian and Urdu literary sources. Husain’s perusal of Deccani masnawis to extract nuggets of information is, therefore, a singular contribution.

The choice of plants, trees, shrubs and herbiage – both indigenous and naturalised – as also the medicinal and aromatic properties of each are spelt out in detail. Flowering trees like kesu, amaltas, kadamb, nagkesar; fruit-bearing ones such as jamun, mango, amla, banana, kathal, shahtoot as well as pomegranate, citron, orange, lime, shaddock, fig, grape, phalsa; scented flowers such as rose, tuberose, chandni, mogra, chameli vie for space in these scented Islamic gardens of the Deccan with medicinal plants such as kafur, sandal, firanjmushk, etc. Two major seventeenth-century Deccani masnawis, Mulla Nasrati’s Gulshan-e-Ishq and Abdul Dehalvi’s Ibrahim Nama, further the analogy between the garden and the world. The fragrance from these scented gardens lingers in lines such as these:

            Nazr ke rang dene kun har yek gul rang ka kasa

            Muatr mann ke karne kun kali har huqqa parmal ka

            (To brighten the eye, each (flower) was a cup colourful

            To perfume the heart, each bud was a box of parmal fragrance)

Also read:

1.     Ebba Koch, The Complete Taj Mahal and the Riverfront Gardens of Agra, London: Thames and Hudson 2006.

2.     D. F. Ruggles, Islamic Gardens and Landscapes, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007

3.     Frances Hodgson Burnett, The Secret Garden, London: Heinemann

This review first appeared in The Herald, Karachi, July 2012.

Review of 3 books by Arab writers

Running as a refrain through these three books – all by Arab women writers and all published in India by Women Unlimited – is a haunting sense of nostalgia and longing. An ode to a world that once was but is no more, each looks back with wistfulness and regret for all that has been lost; but what is more, none seem comforted by a future that holds either relief or succour. The only flashes of colour in an otherwise grim and forbidding landscape belong to the past, the only relief lies in escaping a present that is ominous and forbidding. What, then, is one to make of such a bleak world?

Enormously depressing in one way, the three books are also, oddly enough, hugely uplifting. Displaced, deprived, discriminated, dispossessed these voices might be – weary from trading home-grown despots for foreign ones and vice versa -- each one of them is determined to be heard. The note of defiance, of speaking out, of bearing witness rings out sharp and clear. Possibly, that is their only victory in a world that appears arraigned against them. In reading their words, in listening to their voices, we – regardless of caste, creed, gender and nationality – find common cause with them, establish a bond of solidarity across the black and white lines of a printed page that sets apart their lives from ours. I would like to believe that is all they wanted when they set out to pen their stories: simply to strike a chord somewhere with someone and, as one narrator puts it, in ‘trying to remember as correctly and completely as possible’ record all the suffering and ignominy they had experienced and known.

That no lofty literary ambition propels the writers of these stories is evident from even a cursory reading. The over-riding impulse appears to be to dig into a vast oral archive, to tap into a racial memory that is as old as time, to shake the tree of anima mundi and to record, store and conserve for posterity all that remains on its withered stalk. Memory, for these writers, therefore is a literary tool and the past a mise en scene just as the use of the first person becomes a necessity in most cases.

Dreaming of Baghdad by Haifa Zangama is a searing memoir of imprisonment, torture, humiliation and eventual exile during Saddam Hussain repressive regime. Dipping between past and present, then and now, her home in Iraq and her exile in London, Zangama takes us into the torture chambers of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison and describes the Iraqi people’s struggles against the Baath Party and the terrible scars that remain. Written over a period of eight years, during the Iran-Iraq war, it is the first-of-its-kind account by a radical woman activist from Iraq. As Zangama says, in writing this book she has ‘tried to write about the lives and deaths of a group of young people who were able to foresee the horrible damage that the Iraqi regime was inflicting on its people long before the First and Second Gulf Wars. We were able to see beyond the present and predict the imminent deterioration of Iraq, despite its resources and huge oil wealth. Or maybe because of that. Everything around us indicated our own inevitable demise, but we tried…In writing this book, I felt I was paying a debt long overdue to my friends.’

The Tiller of Waters by Hoda Barakat is a tribute to that which should have been saved and protected but was not. Ravaged Beirut, the site of many a pitched battle for possession since time immemorial, is the setting for one man’s near obsessive-compulsive recollections of not merely the city as it once was but a whole way of life that appears to be forever gone. Niqula Mitri, son of an Egyptian mother and an Orthodox Christian father, inherits both his father’s love for textiles as well as his shop in the city’s old quarters. As his parents die, his neighbourhood is shelled and looted, his shop is burnt to cinders, he appears to be the only man alive in a city that once throbbed with life. As he wanders in a hallucinatory daze through souqs, down boulevards, past mosques, cemeteries and churches, even through a maze of sub-terranean passages, foraging for herbs and berries to keep body and soul together, he brings to life not merely the city he loves so well but reveals – layer by layer – many stories connected with the city that was once the hub of civilisations. Because he loves textiles, he sees the world through the cloth he had once stocked in his shop: ‘a stitch of air’ that is Venetian lace, the shimmer of brocade, the allure of satin, the smoothness of Damascene silk. The analogy of the weaver and weaving is everywhere for, as Mitri tells us, ‘spinning, weaving and sewing are not simply metaphors that help us to see how creation is reflected, to understand its past and how it came to be; they are not helpful only, as Plato said, in understanding that the world pivots on a sort of spindle of diamonds…No, it is more, for the politician is the artisan who crafts the social fabric…The techniques that go into cloth making are in essence like the planning and construction of a city..’ He goes on to conclude: ‘Ignorant are those who do not know the magic of the thread and the curses that the fabric may bring.’

Seeking Palestine: New Palestinian Writing on Exile & Home, edited by Penny Johnson and Raja Shehadeh, explores the idea of Palestine, of what it means to be Palestinian -- whether at home or in exile -- and the past, present and future of being Palestinian. An eclectic set of contributors – poets, novelists, artists, critics, activists – probe, contest, debate, reflect, introspect on the many meanings of these two words: home and exile. For Karma Nabulsi, a child of the revolution, exile is a ‘lost time’, a time when Palestinians were separated from their own revolutionary history. For Rana Barakat, denial of entry into her homeland, spells a state of suspension: belonging neither here nor there. Escape or voluntary flight means ‘portable absence’ to some, whereas for others there is a Palestine that never truly was! Wry, candid, poignant, Seeking Palestine is a tribute to a people who no matter how displaced and dispossessed remain nevertheless determined.

This review appeared in The Hindu, Sunday, 1 July 2012