Good lord. If that wasn’t the most
pointless story I’ve ever read, then I don't know what is.
Most stories, they have a plot, and
characters, and most importantly, a reason for being. The author sets out to
tell you something, and you either like the message or you don’t, or you like
the execution or you don’t. But this story presumably exists in that grey area
where it’s mere existence is questionable. What, I ask you, does this story try
to say? Absolutely nothing, as far as I can tell.
Ibrahim, a drifter with no ties back to his
home, with no family and no girlfriends and a married sibling with her own
life, is roaming around somewhere. We don’t know where or what he’s doing or
who he’s hanging out with. He’s doing something. In between, he thinks about a
parakeet that a neighbour had loaned to their mother. Their mother loved the
parakeet. Once their mother died of cancer – am I being too spoiler-y? Can one
even be giving spoilers for short stories? – Ibrahim and his sister let the
parakeet go, in one of those rare well-written paragraphs that accidentally
crop up in here.
A week after she passed away, his sister had suggested they
release it and he had agreed. They had done so together, standing on the porch
of their parents’ home on a pleasant afternoon – one of those rare occasions on
which they were alone together, united in what they had turned into a symbolic
farewell to the long, difficult years of illness that had plagued their house
lately.
Now, ten years into the future, Ibrahim
dreams about going home. Why? I’m not really sure. And what will he even do
when he gets home? For that matter, what exactly does Ibrahim do? I have no idea. The amount of things
I didn’t know in this story were mind boggling. And while I’ve read stories
where the background mattered little and the intricacies of personal details
mattered even less (for example, Shumaila’s The Hunger <- LINK, an excellent
piece of writing), in this story where nothing much is happening anyway, it
looks prominent and awkward.
Maybe it’d be better in the form of a
novel. The writing certainly isn’t all that bad. It’s just the content itself
that gave me vaguely Catcher in the Rye
feels. No idea what the story is trying to say, or even where it’s trying to
go. With both Catcher in the Rye and
with this story, I have to wonder what the appeal to the publisher was. And why
someone would write this. I guess some things are just bound to remain a
mystery.
Home Calling by Fatima Khalid is from Volume 14 of the magazine Papercuts, a biannual literary magazine by Desi Writers Lounge, a South Asian community of writers.
Home Calling by Fatima Khalid is from Volume 14 of the magazine Papercuts, a biannual literary magazine by Desi Writers Lounge, a South Asian community of writers.