“Dasht-e-Tanhai” wins a Prize for Nadeem Aslam

Writers have always got into trouble with people who think they know the answers….there is no message in my books. My writing is my way of explaining my own life and the workings of my own consciousness. (Nadeem Aslam)

The only time I’m ever fully alive is when I’m writing. When I’d finished this book, I felt like a cage from which the songbird is being removed. For a month I just didn’t know what to do. (Nadeem Aslam)

Nadeem Aslam, a young writer from Pakistan, now in England, outshone more than a hundred other distinguished novelists competing for the 2005 Kiriyama Prize.

“The Kiriyama Prize is awarded annually in recognition of outstanding books that promote greater understanding of and among the nations of the Pacific Rim and of the South Asian subcontinent. Authors from anywhere in the world are eligible, provided that their work is written in English or translated into English and that it relates to the nations of the Pacific Rim or South Asia in a significant way, “ (http://www.kiriyamaprize.org/2005 release.shtml). The Pacific Rim includes all countries bordering the Pacific on all sides.

There are in fact two prizes. One of them is for fiction and the other for non-fiction. The prize money is $30,000 and is equally divided between the two prizes. Nadeem Aslam won the fiction prize for his novel “Maps for Lost Lovers” and the non-fiction prize went to Suketu Mehta for his “Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found.” According to kiriyamaprize.org, “..Suketu Mehta .. reportedly plans to use royalties from the sales of the .. book Maximum City to sue India’s government on behalf of the city’s homeless children.” This is a worthy cause and Seketu should be admired for his noble intention.

The list of the fiction finalists included five of the 165 entries as follows. It included Nadeem Aslam, Rupa Bajwa for her “The Sari Shop,” Ha Jin for “War Trash,” Kelly Ana Morey for “Grace is Gone,” and Perumal Murugan for his “Season of the Palm,” translated by V. Geetha.
The list of the non-fiction finalists included Suketu Mehta, Luis Alberto Urrea for “The Devil’s Highway,” Charles Wohlforth for “The Whale and the Supercomputer: On the Northern Front of Climate Change,” Philip Short for “Pol Pot: History of a Nightmare,” and Masayou Duus for “The Life of Isamu Noguchi: Journey without Borders,” translated by Peter Duus.

Aslam’s novel is about a Pakistani Muslim family that is trying to live a life in a small nameless town, which the locals call ‘Dasht-e-Tanhai,’ the Desert of Loneliness. The part of Pakistan that the family came from used a curse “May your son marry a white woman.” This becomes the nightmare of Kaukab, the central character in the story, whose son married a white woman and divorced. The other son has not returned home in eight years. Her husband’s brother, Jugnu, is living in sin with his girl friend, Chanda.

When the story begins, it was about five months that Jugnu and Chanda had disappeared. The police suspects that Chanda’s brothers murdered them, an honor killing, and have arrested them. Another character, Suraya, who lives in the neighborhood was divorced in Pakistan (talaq, talaq, talaq) by her husband in a fit of drunkenness, and is looking for a temporary husband who would marry her and then divorce so that she could go to Pakistan and get married to her old husband and be with her child whom she had left behind. This process is required by Sharia for a divorced woman. This is a story of Pakistani conservatism in a liberated ambience of England, a story of a civilization clash within a family of blended values of liberalism and orthodoxy. “Eimaan mujhe rokay hai, tau khainchay haiy mujhe kufr” (Faith is compelling me to stop, while unbelief is pulling me away).

Nadeem has handled this relentless tug and other inter-societal stresses rather adroitly. In the words of Kamila Shamsie, “In this book, filled with stories of cruelty, injustice, bigotry and ignorance, love never steps out of the picture – it gleams at the edges of even the deepest wounds. Perhaps this is why the novel never gets weighed down by all the sorrow it carries: there is such shimmering joy within it, too. Here are characters hemmed in on one side by racism and on the other side by religious obscurantism, and yet they each carry remarkable possibilities within them,” (All you need is love, Guardian unlimited, June 26, 2004).

Kaukab’s character is particularly realistic and forceful. She says, “I know I can’t seem to move without bruising anyone, but I don’t mean to cause pain.” In Kamila Shamsie’s words, “She (Kaukab) is.. a woman entirely human, entirely heart breaking… a woman who equates sex with shame and sin; she is the voice of condemnation raised against all transgressions from orthodoxy…”

Dasht-e-Tanhai is a fictional town in England “where Lahore meets Shimla and Bombay meets Dhaka: for the streets here have been rechristened after beloved haunts left behind in the sub-continent, a Malabar Hill and a Park Street, a Naag Tolla Hill and a Scandal Point,” http:indiawriting.blogspot…/maps-for-lost-lovers-by-na deem-aslam.htm.

This reminds me of a tidbit. Around 1969, one weekend night after finishing my laboratory work, I went to a local pub for a drink. At the bar, a white woman started a chit-chat with me. In the course of our chat, she asked me where I came from.

I said, “From Pakistan.”
“Oh, from Bradford, you mean?” she quizzed.

Although it was more than a year that I was living in London, I had barely heard about Bradford. For me, it was just another city among so many others. So I didn’t get the joke, if joke it was. I gave her a blank stare. She told me that Bradford was predominantly populated with the immigrants from Pakistan and India. People called it Pakistan.

I said, “No, not from that Pakistan.”

With the passage of time, Indo-Pakistani culture is firmly planted in England so much so that the Sikhs protesting against ‘Behzti’ in Birmingham were able to block its staging because they thought it slurred and degraded their religion. It was a slap on the face of free speech. Yet, Sikhs carried the day. Young people born in England with their ethnic roots in the sub-continent are seeking and finding their unique intellectual and literary niches in the new environment, which is not new to them any more.

Although majority of the immigrant youths is born in Britain, people straddling two cultures (who were born in the subcontinent and are living in England) are not uncommon. Many of such people are disgruntled and have become rootless. Many of such a lot that I met in London in late 1960s worked long hours, lived shabbily saving every penny that they could, and hankering to go back. These “carpet baggers” were neither ‘here’ where they lived nor ‘there’ where they wanted to go. The new generation is making a home in the new country, which is not new to them, and asserting their identity undauntedly in the face of racism and prejudice.

According to The Independent Online Edition, (Nadeem Aslam: A question of honour), “Nadeem Aslam was born in 1966 in Gujranwala in Pakistan. He came to Britain at the age of 14 when his father, a communist, fled President Zia’s regime and settled the family in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. He went to Manchester University to read bio-chemistry but left in his third year to become a writer. At 13, he had published his first short story in Urdu in a Pakistani newspaper. His debut novel, Season of the Rainbirds (1993), set in rural Pakistan won the Betty Trask and the Authors’ Club Best First Novel awards, and was short listed for the Whitbred First novel award.”

His second prize winning novel, Maps for Lost Lovers,” has won him the platitudes from numerous prestigious reviewers.