FICTION
Heart of darkness
RUMINA SETHI
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This novel is a severe indictment of the lunacy of war in Afghanistan.
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No Space for Further Burials, Feryal Ali Gauhar, Women Unlimited, 2007, p.192, Rs. 250.
No Space for Further Burials is one of the bleakest novels to be written about post-9/11 Afghanistan. It focuses on a U.S. army medical technician who is captured by Afghan soldiers — or perhaps they are guerrillas, rebels or groups of refugees — and thrown into a mental asylum in Tarasmun, which serves as a make-shift prison.
Real lives
He lives through his incarceration and pens together searing episodes involving real people: the one-legged Sabir Shah, the only educated man of a certain village who is thrown into prison for a blasphemous act, but not before an acid attack fuses his jaw and neck together and removes one eye; Bulbul, the America-crazy lout with his brilliant red scarf whose kindness is as overwhelming as his cruelty; the beautiful Anarguli, the pregnant young girl and Bulbul’s beloved, whose husband had been slain by her own father; Noor Jehan, a veritable Florence Nightingale in this wasteland and her husband Waris, both of whom are the caretakers of this god-forsaken asylum and its 40 inmates.
It is through these survivors that the story of war-ravaged Afghanistan is untold. Perhaps the most poignant story is that of Bulbul who, as a young child, sees his father lose his limbs when he unknowingly steps on a landmine. He recounts how the U.S. soldiers had chopped off the trees in their devastated fields for fear of rebels seeking shelter there, leaving poor farmers without fruit and shade. After the death of his father, Bulbul’s mother is married off to his uncle according to the custom and then forced to beg on the streets. Bulbul himself suffers the indignity of working in a way-side joint after undergoing torture for buying boots with his first earnings.
Moments of bliss
Within the debris of the asylum, Bulbul, Sabir, Waris, Noor Jehan and the writer — referred to as firingi — eke out a miserable existence despite the inevitability of death amidst frequent assaults by rebel groups who ki
ll many of the inmates at a whim or disturb their fitful peace whenever they fall short of supplies or have the sexual urge to sodomise young boys.
But even in blight, there are moments of bliss as when Bulbul goes wild bathing naked in the rain or when Sabir’s garnering of grain and fruit brings cheer and warmth. Phrases like “our only living tree” or the reference to the asylum as “home” show how a derelict place can also seem like one’s own, united as they are by a deep suffering and an unspoken agony. Most of all, hope filters in with the birth of Sahar Gul, the Rose of Sunshine, born to Anarguli, who everyone strives to save from certain death. Amidst indiscriminate bombing by the U.S. air force and random deaths of the people in this make-shift prison, No Space for Further Burials becomes a story of solidarity between an American medi
c and his supposed enemies. But gradually, with the setting winter, hunger drives them into a nightmare of horrors as many of them feed on bones and raw carcasses of maggot-infested animals and even start baying for each other’s blood: “I was nothing now, would never be what I had dreamt I could be. I am the silence which fills all the empty spaces of my heart.” Towards the end, we expect the protagonist to escape but the novel ends abruptly in a series of terrifying images with many questions left unanswered, chief among them being: why don’t all of them get away when there is no one to hold them in confinement? And does the protagonist finally flee and tell his story?
Empty words
Notwithstanding, No Space for Further Burials is a severe indictment of the lunacy of war in the vein of Manto’s “Toba Tek Singh”, which is undertaken to bring “liberty and democracy” to Afghanistan, id
eals which are understood neither by the U.S. armed forces nor by those who are natives of Afghanistan. America’s “war against terror” explains away thousands of deaths as “collateral damage”. This neo-colonial bully lies and cheats, uses the Patriot Act to monitor its borders, exterminates “tyrants” and thereby builds its empire. Gauhar’s is a lonely voice that exposes the hollowness of democracy and the outrage committed against minorities and moves us to interrogate parallel war crimes committed by the State.
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