We are Displaced: My Journey and Stories from Refugee Girls around the World

Book Review by Shabir Ahmad Mir

Book Name: We are Displaced: My Journey and Stories from Refugee Girls around the World
Author: Malala Yousfzai
ISBN number: 978-0-316-52364-6 (hardcover)
Year of publication: 2019
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company, New York
Reviewer: Shabir Ahmad Mir

 

“You educate a man; you educate a man.
 You educate a woman; you educate a generation”

 Brigham Young

 

“We Are Displaced: My Journey and stories from Refugee Girls Around the world is a substantial souvenir from one of the world's most prominent young activists and the youngest ever Nobel Prize Laureate, Malala Yousfzai, known for fighting for girls' right to education in impoverished countries that have experienced ghastly war atrocities and human rights violations. She truly represents the mores and standards of what the 18^th century British proto-feminist; Mary Wollstonecraft calls ‘A vindication of the rights of women’. She came into the public spotlight around 2013, surviving a bullet to the head when the Taliban decided to retaliate her activism. Her unflagging support for the education of girls (which nearly cost her life) is evident throughout.

Shabir Ahmad Mir

Yousafzai shares the survival stories of female refugees from around the world. At the age 11, she suffered the slings and arrows of displacement when the Taliban forced her family to leave their idyllic home in the Swat Valley and join the ranks of Pakistan’s Internally Displaced Persons. Yousafzai recounts the agony of leaving behind her “the frolicking world, fraught with friends, and pet chickens” and the dismay at interrupted schooling. She also vividly describes the horror of seeing schools reduced to rubble as a result of bombings, an experience that both politicized her and forced her family into exile in England. In chapter 2, she expresses it piercingly:

“I was eleven when the Taliban started bombing girls’ schools throughout the Swat Valley. The attacks happened at night, so at least no one was hurt, but imagine arriving at school in the morning to find it a pile of rubble. It felt beyond cruel”.

The author devotes only about a quarter of the book to her own story; the remainder is a collection of oral histories from displaced women and girls from countries ranging from Yemen to Colombia to the Democratic Republic of Congo. Each refugee’s tale of survival is equal parts devastating and inspiring, and the narrators do not shy away from the complex, contradictory experiences of fleeing a homeland. The narratives are filled with emotionally specific descriptive details that render each voice powerful and unique. In the prologue, Yousafzai specifically states that her purpose is to transform refugees from nameless, faceless statistics into who they really are: humans whose identities are more than just their displaced status.

She succinctly reveals the purpose behind writing the book:

“I wanted a variety of stories [in my book]. I wanted people to know a Syrian refugee girl. I wanted people to know a Columbian refugee girl. A girl from Guatemala, who had no choice, became an orphan, and had to leave her country for her own safety. I wanted people to know of girls in Yemen, of girls in Uganda, and also the people who welcomed them”.  

Malala's experiences of visiting refugee camps caused her to reconsider her own displacement — first as an Internally Displaced Person when she was a young child in Pakistan, and then as an international activist who could travel anywhere in the world except to the home she loved. In We Are Displaced, Malala not only explores her own story, but she also shares the personal stories of some of the incredible girls she has met on her journeys — girls who have lost their community, relatives, and often the only world they've ever known.

She begins the book with an epigraph from the Somali born British poet Warsan Shire, talking about what makes people become refugees, declares that nobody flees home unless that home has become a shark’s mouth, a dangerous place ready to consume them. In short people only become refugees when they have no other choice. The epigraph that has been extracted from Warsen Shire’s poem and conformed judiciously by Malala Yousfzai.

no one leaves home unless

home is the mouth of a shark.

 

you only run for the border

when you see the whole city

running as well.

 

Following Warsan Shire, Malala Yousfzai through the employment of the metaphor ‘Shark’ unveils anguish over her yearning for the ‘Swat valley’ that she fervently calls Switzerland of the East.

“When I close my eyes and think of my childhood, I see pine forests and snow-capped mountains; I hear rushing rivers; I feel the calm earth beneath my feet. I was born in the Swat Valley, once known as the Switzerland of the East. Others have called it paradise, and that is how I think of Swat”.

‘We are displaced’ by Malala Yousfzai delineates the story of eight young girls and two women who have been internally displaced and those who have helped make the life for these refugees easier in their country. According to the 1951 Refugee Convention of UNHCR, a refugee is defined as “Someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or Political opinion.”

These dauntless and valorous-hearts who share their escapades come from Yemen, Iraq, Columbia, Congo, Myanmar, Guatemala, Uganda, and Syria. The book is divided into two parts. The first part begins with Malala’s story of getting internally displaced; after the Taliban vituperated her at the age of fifteen for standing up for her right to education, and then the final move to Birmingham, UK. In the prologue she shares a poignant thought;

“Millions of men, women and children witness wars every day. Their reality is violence, homes destroyed, innocent lives lost. And the only choice they have for safety is to leave. To ‘choose’ to be displaced. That is not much of a choice.” (Malala, ix-x)

Further, this part details in the first person account Yousafzai's experience being displaced. She very candidly gives a blue print of her ostracism and its ramifications. She details the rise of the Taliban in Mingora, Pakistan which led to forced displacement, with her family moving between relatives in the Shangla District and Peshawar. Three months later, they returned to Mingora to find the city wrecked. Yousafzai continued local activism which culminated in her being shot in the head by a Taliban member. She was taken to Birmingham, England, for treatment and forced to remain there and start a new life. She pathetically cogitates over the consequences on the post-displacement that she smells is likely going to happen:

“I am not an emotional person, but I cried that day. I cried for the life I was being forced to leave. I worried I would never see my home or friends or school again. A reporter had recently asked me how I would feel if I had to leave Swat someday and never return. At the time, I thought it was a ridiculous question, because I couldn’t even imagine the possibility. Now here we were, leaving, and I didn’t know when, if ever, we’d come back”.

In the second part of the book, we are introduced to the ten women and girls who pithily cogitate over their escapades, with Malala sharing how she met or got to know about each of them. There is a common thread binding all the stories together, especially the resilience and endurance of women in varied circumstances.

 The book is a chronicle of the voices of the Yemeni sisters, Zaynab, 18 and Sabreen, 16, where Zaynab received her visa for US, her sister was not as lucky and after a hellacious journey of staying ‘at an empty and Gothic warehouse with a concrete floor and no furniture or even blankets’ (73) and travelling in black tinted buses and boats on the rough waters of the Mediterranean she finally makes to Italy. It is the record of Muzoon, a fighter for women’s education in the refugee camps of Jordan, of Najla, who is an IDP in Iraq, who ran away from home to fight for her right to education, of Maria, another IDP of Columbia, who suffered discrimination within the borders of her country due to her colour and accent. This book is a record of Analisa of Guatemala, who in her bid to reach th0e US was transported and kept like an animal for days, of Marie Claire, who could leave the hatred she felt in Zambia, only through the ultimate sacrifice of her mother and also of Ajida, the Rohingya Muslim, who has no semblance of what the future will hold for her children.

The writer of ‘we are displaced’ forthrightly limns a complete picture of the world under Taliban, a world teetering on the brink of decimation. Malala yousafzai judiciously employs characters who represent the world where education has been reduced to sinful folly and those who rush to schools, as an act of culpability. In Part 1, Chapter 1, we come to know the true state of this dispiriting ambience:

Many girls stopped attending classes or left the area to be educated elsewhere when the ban was announced—my class of twenty-seven had dwindled to ten. But my friends and I continued going until the last day. My father postponed what would have been winter break so we could get in as much school as we could. When the day came that my father was forced to close our girls’ school, he mourned not only for his students but also for the fifty thousand girls in our region who had lost their right to go to school. Hundreds of schools had to close.

Malala Yousfzai very resolutely scrabbles to create a space for the girls where they could expound themselves and be heard. In this context, ‘Kancha Ilaiah’, an Indian political theorist and Activist of Dalit Rights, wisely puts it:

Unless the oppressed learns to hegemonize their own self, unless the culture and consciousness of the oppressed is put forward visibly in public, unless this culture is prepared to clash with the culture and consciousness of the enemy in public, a society of equals will remain an illusion.

The book however comprises of emboldened female characters like ‘Muzoon’, a representative of those unyielding and relentless section of girls who struggle fiercely against the restraint, restraint on girl education:

“You and me, we can be the ripple effect, if we go to school, others will follow”

 (Muzoo, Part 2)

Malala Yousfzai proves to be a global advocate for refugees, an advocate for girl’s education. She advocates that “to be displaced, on top of everything else, is to worry about being a burden on others”.

‘We are displaced’ timely and heart- wrenching, asks only for empathy for the thousands of girls fleeing across dangerous terrain towards freedom and school and tries to convey a poignant truth that home can be the enemy. 

References: Yousafzai, Malala (8 January 2019). We Are Displaced. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. p. x. ISBN 9781474610063

 

Bio: Shabir Ahmad Mir is a PhD Scholar in English Literature at University of Kashmir, Srinagar India. He is a poet and a Book Reviewer and currently working on a project, a novel tentatively tilted; The Abandoned Cities: A Lachrymose tale.202203E,English, Book, Review

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Setu, March 2022

Literary response to Refugee crisis

A study of Mohsin’s Hamid’s Exit West and Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun.

by Shabir Ahmad Mir

Student of English language and Literature
Pulwama - 192301, State: Jammu and Kashmir (India)
Contact: +91 985 877 7990
Email: optimist821@gmail.com

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Abstract:

Refugee crisis is a very hot-button issue at present. Of late, we have seen how refugees from Syria, Myanmar, Vietnam etc. have callously suffered the slings and arrows of displacement and dislocation. As we are aware, refugee crisis gives birth when a dominant and hegemonic group overpowers and victimizes the marginalized and the subaltern. After the fatal and horrendous world wars, the internal and external political tensions, violence and human right violation has increased exponentially resulting in the increase of refugees. The recent fatal technology has further given birth to their escape from their homeland. According to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, in 2017 65.6 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide because of persecution, severe conflict, violence or human rights violation alone. Refugee crises have become a concern of different quarters. Different organisations, NGOs and writers have voiced a concrete concern about refugees. The writers of the contemporary times have given a literary depiction of the pain and sufferings of those who are displaced and marginalized. The paper purports to highlight through comparative framework, how Mohsin Hamid and Gassan Kanafani project refugee crises through their respective works. Although these writers belong to different countries, but their analogous concern related to refugee problems brings them into the similar thematic arena. Mohsin Hamid is an emerging but promising novelist of the coeval times. He was born in Pakistan but bred in Britain. His novels are Moth Smoke (2000), The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia (2013), and the recently published, Exit West (2017). The Reluctant Fundamentalist was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and has won him several awards including Airfield-Wolf Book Award and Asian American Literary Award and has been translated into 25 different languages. He describes himself a mongrel, a hybrid. ‘I wanted to show that everyone is a migrant, even those who never move geographically; moving through time, aging is itself a form of migration.’’ Ghassan Kanafani was a Palestinian author and a leading member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). On 8 July 1972, he was assassinated by Mossad. He has a very rich literary output to his credit. Kanafani was the first to deploy the notion of Resistance Literature with regard to Palestinian works. His novels include Men in Sun (1962), All that's Left for You (1966), Umm Sa'ad (1969), Return to Haifa (1970). The novel Men in the Sun reputed to be "one of the most admired and quoted works in modern Arabic fiction, " was published to great critical acclaim. Rashid Khalidi considers it "prescient". Men in the Sun has been lauded for humanizing the discordant Palestinian plight and criticizing the Arab leaders’ silence on the Palestinian issue. The novel gives a concreate and multidimensional representation of Palestinian refugees concern.

Keywords:

 Refugee crisis, dislocation and displacement, Mohsin Hamid, Ghassan Kanafani.

Introduction:

Exit West is an unbiased projection of the refugee crisis and purports to highlight its gruesomeness. The novel is fraught with wormholes and rips. The consequences of the political turmoil that ultimately leads to the refugee crisis are shown through the two lovers Nadia and Saeed. The novel is about a young couple, Saeed and Nadia, who live in an anonymous city enduring civil war. The couple evanesces through the chimerical doors, which leads to different locations of the world. Omar El Akkad in The Globe and Mail calls the novel "a masterpiece of humanity and restraint". Sarah Begley of Time Magazine praised its relation to the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis and making a love story of refugees nevertheless feel that it is universal. Sindu Sukhdev in The Guardian defined it as a "magical vision of the refugee crisis’’

The readers first encounter Nadia and Saeed at an evening class on corporate identity and product branding. Saeed is very demure and unassuming, the son of a university professor, and works in an odd agency. Nadia, who wears a full black robe is employed by an insurance company, lives alone, rides a motorbike, enjoys vinyl and psychedelic mushrooms. She doesn’t pray. We think we know what will happen next; a boy-girl love story, opposites attracting, secular individuals struggling with the shackles of a theological state. Now, though this unnamed city is filling with refugees, militants are creating unrest. The old world was neither paradise nor hell – one of its parks tolerates ‘early morning junkies and gay lovers who had departed their houses with more time than they needed for the errands they had said they were heading out to accomplish’’-but its terrors are driving out those with ambition and connections. Saeed and Nadia embark on a journey that, like the dream logic of a medieval odyssey, takes them to Mykonos, London, San Francisco.

Exit West shifts between forms, wriggles free of the straitjackets of social realism and eye witness rapportage, and evokes contemporary refugeedom as a narrative hybrid; a fable about civil society that echoes two films - Kevin Brownlow’s It Happened Here, and peter Watkins’s The War Game’’

The turn that things are going to take is forecasted judiciously in the first sentence of the novel itself, ‘…in a city swollen by refugees but still mostly at peace, or at least not yet openly at war, a young man met a young woman in a classroom and didn’t speak to her.” (Hamid, 2017:209) The couple eventually become refugees when the city becomes live and move-in becomes severely tantalizing as if a famished tiger pouncing on a lamb. In order to rebuilt their lost treasury (their lost life’s glories) they set out for an odyssey to Greece, London and U.S.A.

Nadia and Saeed are the representatives of every refugee in the modern world. They reveal through their vexed moves the agitation that every refugee in the modern world encounters. How wisely the narrator in the novel puts it, “We are migrants through time”. He further spouts judiciously in the novel, “The summer it seemed to Saeed and Nadia that the whole planet was on the move, much of the global south headed to the global north, but also southerners moving to other southern places and northerners moving to other northern places” This gestures towards the agitation of every refugee and their myriad will to gain repose from such a vexed state is self-vindicating.

However, there are some vital questions that arise in the readers’ mind regarding the crisis emerge out of the migration. What is it that cajoles a refugee to budge and move? Migration is not a child’s task. It is a very uphill task; everyone contains within himself/herself a precious treasury of past that never wafts away despite being in any turmoil and agitation, one always tries to acquire repose and stability in life. Normality becomes a total ambition, thus a cynosure of everyone’s eye. The omniscient narrator tells us; “it might seem odd that in cities teetering at the edge of abyss young people still go to class….” next we are told that our “eternally impending ending doesn’t put a stop to our transient beginnings and middles until the instant when it does”. The ‘door’ is one of the most vital symbols employed by the novelist. It isn’t a banal symbol that overtures towards the instant transportation of refugees, but also a very grandiloquent image influencing the lives of the millions of people

Ghassan Kanafani was a very prominent writer from Palestine in 1936 and was forced to flee with his family in May 1948, first to Lebanon and then to Syria. His early profession passed as a teacher and later a journalist, moving to Kuwait and later to Beirut, sometimes as an undocumented migrant, and was callously assassinated by Israeli intelligence agents in a car bombing in Beirut in 1972. In his lifetime, Kanafani published eighteen books, including four short novels, many short stories and hundreds of articles. Translated into over a dozen languages, Kanafani’s key works have also been turned into plays and films. Kanafani’s most famous work ‘Men in the Sun’ a short novel published in 1963 –an allegorical tale of three undocumented Palestinian refugees’ failed attempt to travel clandestinely from Basra, Iraq, to Kuwait, in search of work and a better life for their families living in refugee camps, encountering people smugglers and exploitation. It is the story of thousands of people who have died crossing over the past few year the Mediterranean Seas, the Rohingya refugees who have died fleeing by sea to Bangladesh and who suffocated in the back of hot lorries like the protagonists of this tale.

The title is quite ironic: the men would not have suffocated had they been in the sun and able to travel openly, not as undocumented migrants. Similarly today, while thousands undertake perilous land and sea journeys at extortionate cost to themselves, the cost of an airline ticket is far cheaper, but the ridiculousness of this situation, and the desperate refugees’ determination to try it again, is demonstrated in the story of Assad, who had previously smuggled himself into Iraq from Jordan. Tricked by a smuggler and left in the desert, he is found by a foreign tourist who offers him a ride. During the journey, the man tells him how he has travelled all over the region in the space of a few weeks and has even visited Assad’s home town, something Assad, as a Palestinian, cannot do.

The novel candidly purports to shed light on other issues allegedly raised only now by the “refugee crisis”, such as the distinction between a “refugee” and an “economic migrant”. Why do these men choose to travel so far to Kuwait? Expelled from Palestine at the end of the British Mandate and the creation of the state of Israel, the men and their families find themselves living in the squalor of refugee camps. Edward Said in particular has written on this situating of the characters in the ‘present.’ In his analysis of Men in the Sun, Said writes that the conflict in the book turns about the “contest in the present; impelled by exile and dislocation, the Palestinian must carve a path for himself in existence. Though this statement might look futuristically upon the role of the Palestinian, it also shows how the future is dependent upon the present situation, which is in constant contestation with its own stability and struggle against dissolution. Hence, the present (or rather the present situation) becomes continuous in light of the volatility of the Palestinian political reality and the political action or lack thereof of the Palestinians who occupy its core. For instance, the attention to time in the novella is attached to the dangerous position the characters find themselves in. They must pass two checkpoints in the heart of the smuggler’s container, Abu Khaizuran; the time spent at each checkpoint is meticulously calculated and appraised, so that each minute is counted either towards the characters’ survival or demise. When the characters emerge safely the first time, they discuss the period of their submergence in the air-tight container with much anxiety. Abu Qais says, “It was six minutes. I was counting the whole time. From one to sixty, a minute…I counted six times….” Passing the time, it takes to go past two checkpoints while being holed up in a tank, the characters’ overbearing experience of time extends to and is in fact determinant of their death. By the time Abu Khaizuran reaches the second checkpoint and is delayed, the characters, who have taken refuge in the container, are dead. The subliminal political message that Abu Khaizuran puts forth is: “Why didn’t you knock on the sides of the tank?” Therefore, the time to act becomes important, the opportunity for which is missed in the novella, causing Palestinian resistance to revert back to its ‘present stage’ where the present continues to represent instability, the possibility of demise, and even apathy. The world which Kanafani writes about is one of Palestinian political disenchantment; Arab leaders have either turned their backs on Palestine or enabled policies repressive of Palestinians within their own countries. By 1970, Palestinians severely suffered from isolation and dislocation in Lebanon, were swiftly driven out of Jordan beginning with the events of Black September, and were marginalized under two post-coup administrations in Iraq and Syria. This goes to show how allegory cannot presently be grounded in a conception of the Palestinian situation as stable, especially when connotations of temporality and nature of struggle might change with the ability to resist the occupation and dispossession.

References:

Hamid, Mohsin. Exit West. UK. Hamish Hamilton, 2017. Print. Lalami, Laila. The Moors Account. Uk. Penguin, 2014. Print. 9. ............... Secret Son. Uk. Penguin, 2005.Print. Sirees, Nihad. The Silk Market. Damsuscus. Kanaan, 2005.Print

Begley, Sarah (March 20, 2017). "Love in the Time of Refugees". Time

Magazine: 56

El Akkad, Omar (17 March 2017). "Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West, reviewed: A

masterpiece of humility and restraint". The Globe and Mail. Retrieved

18 March 2017.

Sandhu, Sukhdev (12 March 2017). "Exit West by Mohsin Hamid – magical

vision of the refugee crisis". The Guardian. Retrieved 17 March 2017.

"Leaving Morocco". The Washington Post. October 28, 2005.

Men in the Sun and the Modern Allegory, Nadeem Shakir, March11, 2015.

Setu, January 2019

Book Review: A Beautiful Mistake

by Shabir Ahmad Mir

M.A,NET in English Language and Literature.
Book Reviewer and Critic
Gundipora, Pulwama, Jammu and Kashmir,India
Email: optimist821@gmail.com

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A novel although a fictional representation of life and its deeds and misdeeds, its follies and foibles, it is a mirror reflecting the society in which men live and work. A novelist is not a banal creature, but a rhapsodic writer who operates upon the wounds inflicted on a society by choosing characters who work as scissors. The choice of the characters and the art to employ them for varied survey is one of the main concerns of a novelist. A novelist never fears the outer circumstances. He is a cameraman always ready to reach every nook and corner of society to portray it unbiased. In the postcolonial world, the novel has become an obtuse object and a challenge for the reader. The narrative has become turgid and ambiguous. Mikhail Bakhtin,a Russian literary critic, popular for his 'The Dialogic Imagination' has spoofed the term, ‘Heteroglossia’ to describe the novel's organization of socially diverse and competing discourses. Bakhtin studies the novel as 'chronotope’, another term coined by him. He defines chronotope as the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature.

Maya Khandelwal's 'A Beautiful Mistake' is unmistakably a conflict between heart and head of the protagonist. The title of the novel is indeed very apt and suggestive. A signboard of a shop it is; at the very first glance, the readers get acquainted about the inner ambiance of the work. The novelist has almost put behind many novelists and dramatists whose titles were full of bathos like Noel Coward whose one of the dramas has a same baroque title as 'Bitter Sweet'. The ironical marriage of the antithesis sets the tone of the novel. A mistake takes place in the absence of mind, in other words the absence of mind gives birth to a mistake. The gaffe committed by King Lear of William Shakespeare when he banishes Cordelia because she couldn't succeed in flattering him. Mansi too like Cordelia, in the novel commits a beautiful mistake. She has deep love for her father but couldn't express it because she too ‘can’t heave (her) heart into (her) mouth.’

The realization of the same and the demarcation as a ‘mistake’ is the daily choir of the rational part of our being. Mansi fails to realize that the world is composed of swindlers and to be straight like Cordelia can prove pernicious. She logically knows that the ship she is voyaging on is made of a thin sheet of emotions which can be battered by any sharp object that the society abounds in. She embarks on this journey knowingly, willingly at the cost of finding no coast of conventional solace. Like an explorer, she doesn’t necessarily have to land on a prefixed spot, but she can go on for months and years as long as the supply of love doesn’t run out. This long wait like Hamlet's delay in murdering his father's murderer lands her in ‘to be or not to be’ situation. However Mansi fails to blend her emotions with her actions. She couldn't realize that the division of the two often debacles. What if she would have pondered over John Donne's unification of sensibility? She tries to become a Marloweian figure, Doctor Faustus; her mind goes vestigial until like Faustus restores her consciousness at the end. One is reminded of the scene in ‘Doctor Faustus’when:

The Devil will come, and Faustus must be damn'd.

O, I'll leap up to my God! Who pulls me down?

See, see, where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!

One drop would save my soul, half a drop: ah, my Christ. 

Therein lies however the “Beauty” of this very “Mistake” which can only be perceived by heart, by the emotional part of our being.

The marriage of the misfits is enough to hint the contents of the novel – which literally is the misfit of their marriages.

Mansi introduces herself as a young wife and a mother. She is shown before a precipice where she has either to turn back or to plunge herself directly into the deep gorge, “either be a dreamer or a mother.”

This tug of war between the two options, both of them being the inevitable parts of herself, she realizes that times aren’t going to be too easy for her. Her husband, for whom she fought such a war like a brave Hercules, was literally washing away into a “wrong number” dialed in a hurry and passion of teenage.

Next in her reminiscence we meet her as a collage-going teen who is really a  good  student and again a misfit for her own chosen company. She is a “good girl” and instead of fighting this badge, she goes to every extent to keep up the same. She doesn’t dress fashionably because her father feels uncomfortable if she goes out like “not-a-good-girl”.

A wrong number dialed in a sportive moment turns out not just to be the right one, but one that blocks all other calls on her line. The novelist has employed wisely the device of chance here. It can be seen that the role of the chance is central to the novel's swift movement like Desdemona’s Handkerchief in the play ‘Othello’ of William Shakespeare. The wrong number sets the plot of the novel in motion. It heightens the effect of the events leading to the climax. Aditya, just the other guy with whom the prank will be played, turns the tables on her game, catches her in her own snare. The way with which Aditya tackles her tricks makes a mark on Mansi’s heart so much so that she is anxious to call him again. Conflict of self-identity is at peak in the beginning and the closure of the novel. In the middle however, Mansi, not very unlike the Victorian heroines, finds and attaches her identity to Aditya. On him she wants to depend, not owing to any weakness in her will but purely out of love she has been cradling for him. In turn Aditya is trying to establish his own identity through business. They meet, they see each other, the kiss and push the relation to such a solemnity where marriage is the only nearest station. The family tension, her sister’s mistreatment and divorce, Neha’s brother’s suicide, the case of lover on the train play a good part they’ve been assigned.

Characters are widely divided into at least two groups: those forced by their parents to marry unwillingly, and those who choose to live or to die out of their choice. The first group, even as elderly Mansi’s parents fail to live, though they all the time are conscious of the misbehavior they are inflicting upon their mates, and are therefore objects of sympathy sometimes. They linger as shadows, and hunt for reasons to continue to survive, and when that reason is removed, they seize to follow the decency that the society expects notwithstanding the forced yoke that lays there tying down the partners. For instance, the death of Mansi’s son is enough to fragment her family. Men in the novel are treated as judges and torchbearers, which in fact is a dark reality. It’s not only the father of Mansi imposing such dictates on the family but to a large extent Aditya stands a culprit too, “Will you be able to appease out taste?”

This is not just a simple enquiry about the cooking of Mansi, it has a scope of a rhetorical question. This is the precursor of the events that are about to unfold after their happy marriage. What is to happen to such a marriage in which a possessive husband doesn’t even allow her wife to work, taking shield of love? To talk in Aditya’s language, “Will this man please her tastes as the young Aditya would?” Answers to these  will unfold themselves as we know the history behind this marriage. Women are targeted in the novel as creatures feigning a mock-coyness. This is not the coyness of Marvell's' mistress but the coyness of Richardson 'Pamela'- subsidiary, subdued and meek. This novel deals with the life of the lower middle class and has therefore no scope for rebels and heroic sparks. Female are drawn realistically and almost all, except the protagonist and her sister confirm to the same type. Women cannot choose, they have to accept their lot as it is. The male in turn are not tyrants and inside their hard skulls they know all along the unmistakable folly they are committing only because of the society. They make women ‘helpless’ and women in turn play harder to remain their ‘steady girls’.

The novel is a realistic one: no unexpected events, and to the amazement of curious reader, no unexpected encounters. The tale goes as normally as it can but has its own elements of surprise. Readers laugh, they hold their breaths; they cry; the magic of narration never seizes to draw a web of a colorful world.

The novel is written in a simple and lucid language and is often full of poetry in prose. Pithy sentences, sharp resolutions, satisfying endings draw it nearer to the diary-entry genre, though much fast forwarded one. From Adam and Eve’s tale to Goldsmith’s poetry, from love-over-telephone to Facebook and text messaging, the novel is a variegated mixture of romantic imagination and Facebook jargon which can be a great entertainment if some mistakes and typos are ignored. A variety of emotions viz. love, sympathy, physical passion and paternal fill the novel and make it a world in itself.

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A Beautiful Mistake
Genre: Novel
Author: Maya Khandelwal
Published by: Partridge India
Year of Publication: 2013
Language: English
ISBN: 978-1482810189
Pp: 438, paperback
Price: ₹ 751.00
Reviewed by: Shabir Ahmad Mir

Setu, October 2018

PASTORAL JOYS

by Shabir Ahmad Mir

Student of English language and Literature
Pulwama - 192301, State: Jammu and Kashmir (India)
Contact: +91 985 877 7990
Email: optimist82@gmail.com

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leave me to the mercy
of these farthest woods.
the touch of vernal breeze,
shepherds happy in their flocks,
fawns run and leap in ecstasy,
the shepherd whistles and sings,
the milky waters dribbling down,
the birds drench their feathers,
this land of pastoral dreams,
devoid of politicians and priests,
away from the roar of deadly guns,
the fume of fatal smoke,
where pellets usher in like rains,
shrieks which can pierce a beast,
today a repose from the shrieks,
my legs shudder to go back,
the vale of blood festivities,
flames that with horror rise and engulf.
innocence drowning viciously,
the dusk has approached sir,
the hour to return back has come,
my valley like a Jacobean theatre,
murder, wails and morbid sky sir.
the horror! the horror...

Setu, September 2017