FICTION
Meditation on loss
IRA SINGH
|
Despite being slightly overwritten, this is a far better novel than any contemporary Indian novel.
|
Broken Verses, Kamila Shamsie, Bloomsbury, Penguin India, 2005, p.352, £10.99, special indian price £5.99.
KAMILA SHAMSIE'S fourth novel, Broken Verses, is a prolonged meditation on the nature of loss. The novel is the story of Aasmaani Inqualab, whose quest it is to discover what happened to her mother 14 years prior to the events described in the book.
Aasmaani's mother was the feminist activist Samina Akram, a legendary figure even in her own time. Her relationship with the man the book simply refers to as "The Poet" is the reason for Samina's death; two years prior to her death he had been tortured and then beaten to death; his last great works burnt and his house ransacked by agents of the State. The book opens when Aasmaani returns to Karachi, joins a T.V. studio and makes the acquaintance of Ed, the son of Samina's close friend Shahnaz Saeed. Shahnaz Saeed, a famous actress, is making a comeback in a T.V. serial after 15 years. Ed and Aasmaani become — inevitably — close, after some initial pyrotechnics. Ed, who has just returned from 10 years in New York and has joined the T.V. studio, begins to feed into her quest to discover what happened to her mother and to The Poet, whom she is tempted to believe is not only still alive, but sending her messages in code.
Complex history
Through the recreation of Samina and The Poet in Aasmaani's memory, Shamsie gives us a complex and moving picture of Pakistan and its repressive history. The many subsidiary characters who enter the novel in the course of this recreation are all authentically portrayed, as are the protagonist's father, stepmother and half sister; in fact, the trio represent the triumph of decency: her stepmother brings her up in her mother's frequent absences.
The problem, therefore, does not lie with Shamsie's grasp of history, or of the impact that history has on the lives of people. For example, while Ed is discoursing on the impact of the twin towers on the lives of Muslims and about how he was stopped being seen as an individual following 9/11, he says that he thought: "now history will happen and I can do nothing but be caught up in it". In response, Aasmaani thinks satirically: "Extraordinary, that someone who'd grown up in Pakistan could say a thing like that, utterly straight faced, as though history hadn't been breathing down our necks all our lives".
Thin plot
It doesn't lie in Shamsie's ability to tell a story, or in her skill at that. It lies, rather, in the thinness of the plot: only somebody delusional would believe that The Poet was still alive and sending her messages in code, or would believe that her mother is going to reappear, when it is clear that she killed herself following the deep depression she suffered after the death of The Poet. Thus the problem lies with plausibility: while we are given to believe Aasmaani is mildly unstable (her family fusses and clucks over her, giving her license to behave as peculiarly as she wants and her potted history of her own career and dead end jobs gives us a portrait of somebody who has not yet found herself), she does not seem to be quite as dotty as would be required to carry the weight of the plot. It also does not seem plausible that she has arrived at this moment so many years after the events the book traces. This time lag in itself is not an unusual literary trope: the quest novel often stages, as it were, its events. But these have to be staged more credibly, with a greater emphasis on motivation and on coherent resolutions.
It remains, however, to be said that despite being slightly overwritten, this is a far better novel than any contemporary Indian novel in English I have read recently (and alas, I have read a great many). Perhaps it is because Pakistani writers have an edge over their Indian counterparts: repressive regimes, ironically enough, often yield startling literary talent. On the other hand, it might simply be that Shamsie clearly has something to say, and she says it well. She is also on very sure ground in describing a city (Karachi) that she obviously knows well and loves, which is always a positive in a writer. Shamsie is a writer worth reading.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
