This is a novel set in Zamana, a (fictional) city in Pakistan, a place of violence and fear and mob riots and religious intolerances, where love still tries to flourish, where atrocities and human rights violations are daily fare, and yet there still live people of quiet dignity, elegance of spirit, and tremendous personal courage. Zamana is a place where Christians are persecuted by Muslims, not allowed to drink from the same water sources, or mix with Muslims, segregated and discriminated against in every way, every day.
Our protagonists are Massud and Nargis, a husband-wife pair of prize winning architects, who employ as housekeepers a Christian couple and their daughter, Helen (18 when we meet her), whom Massud and Nargis regard nearly as their own. They helped Lily, the father, buy a rickshaw to make a living with, after Grace, Helen’s mother had been killed a few years before. (She is killed by a Muslim man who was released after only a year in prison as a reward for having memorised the Koran; Massud and Nargis who wanted to proceed by the letter of the law, later blame themselves when the judge is gunned down and the lawyer and his family are shot at until they all have to go into hiding. Lily and Grace were not literate, but Helen is well read and well educated thanks to Nargis and Massud.
A few years after Grace’s death, Lily falls in love with the cleric’s widowed daughter, Aysha, who lives in the mosque opposite the blue house of Massud and Nargis. This of course is a relationship strictly prohibited although they have both lost spouses, because Lily is Christian and Aysha is Muslim (and the wife of a martyr). When this relationship is discovered, soldiers rampage through the area, burning down houses of Christians and beating them up and killing 12; this is a disturbance which was planned; Lily and Aysha just provided the excuse needed. Lily escapes, but meanwhile, Helen also is on the run, and they lose contact with each other.
Helen was staying with Nargis, who has just lost Massud in a shooting by Americans, and the soldiers or intelligence are bringing pressure to bear on her and other next-of-kin of those who were killed in that shooting, to publicly pardon the Americans. When Nargis refuses, they intimidate her and physically assault her, and threaten her with worse. In the midst of all this, a young man called Imran comes to Nargis’ house, telling her he gave blood to try to save Massud, and she takes him in. When she and Helen escape from the house before they can be caught by soldiers and brutalised further, Imran goes with them, and becomes a lifeline.
All the main characters have a backstory which is interesting, and all their lives seem steeped in violence and injustices. Nargis herself was Margaret, and a Christian, before she reinvented herself for college, tired of being persecuted and discriminated against. As Christian Margaret, her older sister, Seraphina, had been extremely brutalised, and perhaps it was partly in self-defense too, that Nargis takes on this new identity. Massud never found out his wife was not a Muslim, even though neither were devout or practising.
Imran is from Kashmir, and the litany of his family members who were taken away, tortured, killed, kidnapped, etc is a long and terrifying one, including Imran himself. When still a child, his grandfather taught him to look for a flower which the grandfather does not even know the name of, but would draw Imran and his brother a picture of, because his father vanished after buying these bulbs from a man, and these bulbs would be in his pocket.
The mass graves of Kashmiris, who had been killed and buried in secret by Indian soldiers, were beginning to be discovered by then, and thousands of young men were missing – either murdered, or crossing the border into Pakistan for guerrilla training. The grandfather began to advise everyone to carry bulbs and seeds in their pockets, and to inform their family and friends what specific plant each was carrying upon their person, in order than they would know what flowers to look for after the Indian soldiers had tortured them to death.
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Even Imran’s mother is taken away, and he and his brother themselves are taken for torture and later released. They then go in search of their mother and uncles, with no food or money, and risking daily and hourly their own capture and death. When Imran’s brother too is gunned down then dragged behind a military vehicle for days until nothing remained on the end of the rope, Imran begins another long journey, this time to Pakistan, and eventually meets Nargis and Helen.
The conditions under which people are living in Pakistan, in Kashmir, as depicted here, are beyond inhumane, it is riotous terror and precarity taken to an extreme. However, what Aslam tries to do is create these little pockets or oases of beauty, love, hope, and anything lovely amidst such darkness and suffering and loss. It is hard to imagine how a young man like Imran has any capacity left, in him, to fall in love, but he does. And seeing the young love blossoming between these 2 young people, Nargis tells Helen, “
The beginning, the middle, and the end of love – they all have their rules. Both of you must act with dignity and honour towards each other during these stages.
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Not only does she honour their love by taking it seriously, she upholds such integrity in a time when so much else is lost – lives, homes, securities, futures.
Likewise, in part of his escape, Lily meets Farid, the manager of the Museum of Glass Flowers, who asks no questions but talks to Lily when he gives him food and sanctuary after Lily is beaten up by his own destitute Christian friends who recognise him in a teahouse and hold him responsible for soldiers killing 12 of their own and burning their houses. He tells Lily that his son is doing a PhD in US and says he hates Pakistan and is never coming back to live there.
What I am about to say does not apply to you […] because you have been wronged every day of your life by this country, I am absolutely sure. So I am only speaking for myself when I say that despair has to be earned. I personally have not yet done all I can to change things. I haven’t yet earned the right to despair.’ He looked at Lily and smiled. ‘ That’s what I think of Pakistan.
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One cannot help but surmise this may well be the author’s own POV being expressed.
There are many touching, tender moments in this novel, partly created by the storyteller’s skill, and partly just out of Aslam’s ability to arrange words with such impact. So much so that though the novel is actually one unrelenting stream of horror, it does not read that way. There are many uplifting moments, many sentences that suddenly glow with joy, even when every direction looks hopeless. One of Aslam’s strategies is in finding – and describing so well – those small moments of beauty in a day, e.g. Massud who wakes feeling a breeze, lying next to his beloved wife, Nargis, falls back asleep as
he remembered reading somewhere that the smell of bread instills kindness in human beings.
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Or else how those who lost loved ones in terrible conditions and are themselves threatened and assaulted constantly, still cope without losing their own humanity:
the soul is a pocket in which you carry the names of those you love.
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One of the most remarkable little side stories of hope in unhope is how Nargis, Helen and Imran sew back together the pages of a book which was Massud’s a precious book which was deliberately shredded up by an intelligence officer sent to bully Nargis. They use gold thread and painstakingly piece together the pages from hundreds of fragments, to create Kintsugi, “The art of mending pottery with lacquer mixed with powdered gold. The logic was that damage and restoration were part of the story of an object, to be accepted rather than concealed. Some things were more beautiful and valuable for having been broken” p79. In typical Aslam style, there is a backstory even to the book – it is entitled That They Might Know Each Other, and contains 21 sections – the Book of Earth, the Book of Water, the Book of Motion, the Book of Numbers, etc, which all detail umbilical historical connectivity globally. This book was written by Massud’s father, lost, then found by Massud in an activity to transfer books from a library to its new premises, just moments before Massud was gunned down. Aslam typically imbues so much with powerful symbology and grave meaning.
This is a very richly told novel indeed, a tapestry woven by a master storyteller, with tremendous attention to detail, much gold thread and beautiful glints everywhere, but a tapestry depicting a dark, even shocking state of affairs in Pakistan and Kashmir. Immensely readable, as Aslam’s writing always is, tender but unsentimental, touching and terrifying in equal measures.
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