Fiction
Between cultures
ANANDHI SUBRAMANIAN
|
Aslam is courageous for recording his impressions of an insular world.
|
Maps for Lost Lovers, Nadeem Aslam, Faber and Faber, 2005, p.369, special Indian price £2.99.
IF you are a logophile, then Nadeem Aslam's lyrical prose will enchant and suffuse you with an epicurean pleasure at having savoured a rich word-wine. If not, his writing may appear verbose and merely a surfeit of flowery prose, a clever distraction from a thin plot. I, for one, got drunk on the literary cabernet that Aslam's Maps for Lost Lovers is. And, truly, like a fine red takes years before the tongue can appreciate the smooth, full-bodied and robust taste, so too Aslam has taken over a decade to bring out the novel.
Aslam's story of the exiled migrant is old: the desolation, the alienation, the loss have all been well chronicled from the time of Dante but, nevertheless, it cannot be more relevant and topical than now in the post-9/11 world.
... Pakistan is a poor country, a harsh and disastrously unjust land, its history a book full of sad stories, and life is a trial if not a punishment for most of the people born there ... Roaming the planet looking for solace, they've settled in small towns that make them feel smaller still, and in cities that have tall buildings and even taller loneliness...
Poignant lives
The linguistic brilliance of Aslam breathes a sharp poignancy to the lives and loves of a Pakistani migrant community in an unnamed English town. Its residents will only refer to it as Dasht-e-Tanhaii. The Wilderness of Solitude. The Desert of Loneliness.
We are told at the beginning that two lovers, Chanda and Jugnu, a lepidopterist, may have been murdered by the girl's brothers in an honour killing ritual. As the novel traverses the four seasons, it records the upheaval in the small community which relives its memories of the dead. The poetic prose opens to us the season's magic: bewitching is Aslam's world of trees, butterflies, peacocks, flowers ... nature providing a framework to the violent events.
Jugnu's brother, Shamas, is a dreamy (as they all are?) communist who chooses to live in the rundown neighbourhood and turns down an OBE for he "neither seeks honour among men nor kingship over them".
Shamas' wife Kaukab, the daughter of a cleric, born and raised in the shadow of a minaret, is a devout Muslim torn between love for her children and blind faith in religion. Her son accuses her of not allowing reason to enter the house. Her interaction with Whites is non-existent ... The thank you that she murmurs to the flower deliveryman is her third exchange with a white person this year.
Religion and modernity
She and the neighbourhood women curse the day they came to England ... We should never have come to this deplorable country, this nest of devilry from where God has been exiled. No, not exiled — denied and slain...
Aslam places Kaukab's character at the heart of the conflict between religion and modernity. On the advice of the cleric, she mixes "salts" in her son Ujala's food so that he will be obedient, little knowing that she's feeding him bromide which lowers the libido!
She believes that Islam says that in order not to be unworthy of being, only one thing is required: love. Yet, she cannot reconcile this with Chanda and Jugnu cohabiting outside of wedlock. She sees that her dogmatic beliefs are driving away her family but will not question her faith.
Aslam makes it difficult to condemn her; this woman trapped within the cage of permitted thinking, moving between guilt and pain ... I know I can't seem to move without bruising anyone but I don't mean to cause pain. She misses not having been allowed to ride a bicycle as a child but forbids her daughter from riding one. Her contradictions make her husband wonder at times who the real Kaukab is ... the heroine of the story of his life ... who sometimes stood over him and twisted her hair into a yard-long rope, letting beads of water fall onto his face, waking him ... eyes glittering with mischievousness.
Aslam is courageous for recording his impressions of an insular world, the conflicts of acculturation. Living in a strange country, refusing to learn the local language and leading hermetic lives, these migrants fear corruption from a "degraded" Western society, yearn for a putative homeland and seek to preserve a cultural heritage that is at risk of being cast aside by their offspring, who are born and bred in England.
The craft shines
Aslam is caustic about the belief in djinns, the rituals of exorcism that kill. He illustrates the cultural practices that place women at a disadvantage, treating them as inferior: the outcome of a narrow interpretation of Islam; a system that conditions people into thinking that it is never to be blamed, never to be questioned. At the same time, Aslam records the viciousness of racism; middle England rearing its ugly right-wing head. The natives resent the migrants but gradually acknowledge their existence, albeit bestowing them an inferior status.
Violence dogs the story but it is ringed by the hope of love triumphing. The writer's craftsmanship shines through the pages, his use of metaphor and analogy revelling in the beauty of the language: naan bread shaped like ballet slippers, dry pomegranate seeds to be patted onto potato cakes like stones in a brooch, chilli seeds that were volts of electricity, peas attached to the inside of an undone pod in a row like puppies drinking from their mother's belly (startling imagery that!).
Maps for Lost Lovers is a powerful story that is currently playing on the world stage: a chapter from Huntington's much-touted clash of civilisations. This is a must read both for lovers of the language who'd enjoy the poetical tour de force as it is for someone who wishes to understand the literature of exile.
Printer friendly
page
Send this article to Friends by
E-Mail
Literary Review
