Well. Guess we’re back to the same old
disappointment after all.
The sad thing is that it hits on so many of
the stereotypes, that if the author had just been aiming to be a bit more
unconventional it would have been brilliant. Written from the point of view of
a young girl who is about to get married, it talks about her arranged marriage,
her grandmothers, the cries of partition in the air, and Jinnah (the actual man
in the qaraqul cap, as should have been obvious, looking back). And it manages
to talk about these things while being very, very boring.
In
the middle of the humid summer nights, when it rains, I look out of the
latticed window and dream of open fields.
I wanted to like it. I really did. But the
first sentence carried so many clichés that I groaned internally: humidity,
rain, gazing out through windows, fields. All it needed was mangoes, a setting
sun, and a girl with henna on her hands and her face covered by a dupatta. South
Asian stereotypes check, check, and check.
But I’m always willing to give stories the
benefit of the doubt. Maybe this was supposed to be a self-aware piece,
critiquing the stereotypes while using them. But if it was supposed to be
subversive or a parody, I missed it entirely.
I
want to run to the roof where my brothers and father sleep when it does not
rain, and jump up and down and scream a little. This is not normal, surely.
These strange, impulsive desires are not those of a respectable girl from a
decent Indian Muslim family.
The problem, if I do say so myself, is that
all of these things have been done to death. A girl who feels stifled by the
limitations imposed by society; partition and Jinnah’s fan base; arranged marriages.
And while I’m not necessarily against repetition of the same themes – I firmly
believe that all stories have been told before, and are just being repackaged
into newer, different forms all the time. Rather, what we need is a new look at
an old tale. The Bride by Bapsi Sidhwa talks about almost the same thing, but
it manages to talk about so much more than this. The bride in this story, in
stark contrast, is insipid, uninspiring, almost invisible. Which is funny since
the story is told from her perspective.
I
should be crying for home and my family like all brides do, instead of weeping
quietly at a predictable future.
The thing is that the story really tried. It
talked about grandmothers and their fates. It talked about having a progressive
husband, and about living in purdah, and about how girls and boys have their
fates decided for them. It touched upon voting rights in the west and the cry
of a separate homeland in the subcontinent. And it managed to do all of this in
the dullest way possible. The writing was weak, and the plot even weaker.
Overall, to read a better version of the
same story, check out Bapsi Sidhwa. You can give this one a miss.
Tall Man with a Qaraqul Cap by Sidra Zia is from Volume 17 of the magazine Papercuts, a biannual literary magazine by Desi Writers Lounge, a South Asian community of writers.