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Search for miracles
IF it is the beauty of the intricately designed shells that fascinates Daanish and open different worlds for him, for Dia life takes on a different hue and meaning as she watches silkworms metamorphose into cocoons, dancing figure-eights, each a self-contained unit of life.
Love, hate, treachery, violence, life, death, silkworms, shells, guns, beauty, filth — God's rich tapestry has a place for everything. While trying to understand the will of God, Uzma Aslam Khan's Trespassing is the story of two young people trying to leapfrog into a freer world; it is also the story of women cocooned in their private worlds and dreams, of politically liberal men who turn strangely orthodox in private and most importantly, it is a story crying out for the miracle which would some day transform the world into a happier place.
Set in Karachi, the book introduces us to Riffat, a gritty entrepreneur seizing opportunity to give shape to her dreams. In the conservative milieu where boundaries of personal freedom and expression are strictly guarded, she is a pioneer of sorts, a role model for other women. But success has extracted its price and left her a lonely figure, a subject of slander and gossip. Dia, her daughter, has inherited her mother's independent spirit. Acutely conscious of the boundaries of her confinement, Riffat had vowed never to let her daughter suffer shame on account of the choices she made. "Along comes Daanish, a student from America returning home to his father's funeral. In Daanish, Khan describes some of her experiences of living in the land of free and plenty. Daanish is a student of journalism at a university precisely at the time when America is bombing Iraq for invading Kuwait. While his professors drawl on about speaking the objective truth, Daanish is taken aback to find that there are simply no takers for the real truth. Back home, Daanish has to contend with another kind of truth. Without his father, the world he had known will never be the same. An over-zealous mother, out to reclaim her son, has removed every article that connected Daanish to his father. There is nothing in his old room that he recognises or even likes. His days in Karachi, the sweltering heat made more miserable by long hours of load shedding and acute water shortage, are filled with ennui. At the water office where he makes futile trips to get a water tanker, someone wants to know how different was Amreeka. Even Daanish wonders how "there" is a reflection of all that is orderly and beautiful. Providing another perspective of the times is Salaamat. It is his story that lingers in your mind long after you have finished the book. Salaamat belongs to a family of fishermen who once lived by the sea. Now, as foreign trawlers come and trespass on the waters that had provided them their livelihood, they have decided to move to the city. It is the story of Salaamat's uprooting and his subsequent journey through cities that offer him employment — his life forever touched by threat and violence till he is pulled into an inescapable vortex when he becomes part of a terrorist group claiming to fight for a Sindhi homeland.
Whether it is arson and looting triggered off by a young girl's accident in the streets of Karachi or Mr. Mansoor's kidnapping and murder, Khan does a particularly skilful job of creating a sense of foreboding and describing violence. The atmosphere, the author says, is drawn from her own experience of life in Karachi in the 1980s. Those were turbulent times, she says. Guns were everywhere and practically everybody one knew had been touched by violence.
Trespassing was written over a period of six years while she was holding a teaching job. Her first novel The Story of the Noble Rot, which had taken her four years to write, and another four to find a publisher, had met with tepid response. Trespassing oozes confidence but also a certain slickness, which is irritating. The palette has myriad colours but there are one too many issues to handle.
Trespassing, Uzma Aslam Khan, Penguin, p.448, Rs. 395.
MAITREYEE SAHA
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