The House of Bilquis (originally published as ‘Twilight’ in Australia) is a sort of pointless book, in that its plot
doesn’t seek to do much beyond give the author space to hold forth on the
decline of the times and so on and so forth. As a commentary on the times it’s
faintly interesting, but because its characters feel purposeless and there is
no central conflict hooking you in, it was hard to remember why one should keep
reading.
An abyss was opening
in her heart. It was not just her son’s wedding that made her unhappy. I was a
succession of events, all interconnected and related, a pattern of setbacks,
rebuffs and hindrances, both within and without, that had formed the fixed idea
in her mind that her illustrious family had run out of luck.
The plot had lots of space to be cool, but unfortunately
didn’t manage to quite elicit any of the charm required to set it apart from
other books. Set in the 1980’s in Pakistan, it tells the story of Bilquis
Begum, a matriarch living in Karachi who is finding it very hard to accept her
son Sarmad’s marriage to an Australian woman. What’s interesting is that it
doesn’t really seem, to me at least, that times have really changed, because I
can pretty much imagine my own mother’s reaction if my brother brought home a
foreign wife from his studies, and I’d expect the same disappointment and
distrust to surface. In retrospect, what the author does well is give enough
complexity to Bilquis so that she’s not just a stereotypical evil
mother-in-law. As the head of a wealthy family, widowed and dependant on a
swarm of servants, Bilquis’s trepidation stems not only from the fact that her
son has refused to allow her to make a suitable desi match for him, but also
about the fact that he himself will be living in Australia, leaving her without
any support in her old age. This commentary on the times, which feel so
relevant even in this day and age, might be the only thing the author managed
to do well.
Most well-to-do
families sent their young men to good universities abroad with the exdpectation
that they would pay attention to their studies. It was also assumed, in an
unspoken sort of way, that they might sow their wild oats and do the things
that young men must do before settling down. As long as they kept their peccadilloes
in the West, no questions were asked. They returned home to sterling careers
and arranged marriages and no one was the wiser.
In keeping with this theme of interpretation of society,
another important part of the story was the introduction of Kate as Sarmad’s
wife, an outsider who could observe the lifestyle of the rich in Pakistan from
a wonderfully refreshing eye. As a Pakistani, I’ve always been slightly aware
of how privileged certain aspects of our lifestyles are: even in my middle
class upbringing, we had five part-time maids, one gardener, one errand boy,
and multiple more workers who frequented our house for smaller, more random
chores. In the family I’ve married into, we have a full-time help who lives
with us, one part-time babysitter for the one single child at home, three maids,
one driver, one gardener, and so on and so forth. For Pakistanis
who exist in the upper middle class to elite range, this is the reality we live
in, because poverty is so rampant, and unions which protect the rights of
workers are so non-existent, and people are desperate for work. And so for me,
this wasn’t something extraordinary until I realized the obvious lack of such
people on my foreign trips. In London, I found out that a family shared one
common bathroom. For me, who had always seen one bathroom per room back in
Pakistan, the idea of a shared bathroom is amazing and frankly alarming. Which
is why it’s fascinating to see this kind of decadence, even in middle-income
households, through the eyes of someone who hasn’t lived here.
It was her first trip
to Pakistan and everything was foreign. While she had heard Sarmad talking of
servants, and she knew about babysitters and cleaners who were still familiar
and middle-class figures in Australia, of even the butlers and scullery maids
of Victorian novels, she had never experience a life where people did not have
to wash clothes, cook meals or clean the house because their servants did
everything for them, from the moment they awoke to when they went to bed.
On the flip side of all this great commentary was the plot, which
was the primary reason this book didn’t rate very well. Besides Sarmad’s
marriage, Bilquis also spends her time worrying about her maidservant, an
efficient and hardworking girl named Mumtaz, who is having an affair with the guard
next door. Omar, who has come from Karachi and has ideas of Jihad he would like
to try out, is also a product of the times, what with the Islamization that had
gripped Pakistan in that decade. He spends his time dreaming about fighting for
a great and noble cause, and meanwhile being both conflicted and happy about
his relationship with Mumtaz.
What made some women
wicked and other women virtuous? Was it possible to seduce a virtuous woman? If
a man seduced a woman, then didn’t she have to be fundamentally wicked anyway?
The problem was that I didn’t really care what happened to
Mumtaz and Omar, or for that matter to Sarmad and Kate. And a book which can’t
make you connect to the characters can only survive through the force of its
writing, so brilliant as to reduce everything else’s importance. Unfortunately,
since that isn’t present here, all we can concentrate on are the other things
the book tries to point attention to, such as the social and political climate
of the 80’s, and how the wealthy operated in those times. Bilquis’s resentment
of her sister’s marriage to a man whom Bilquis considers below their social
class is pretty much representative of this system. Modernism, as represented
by the wealthy in this book—with their English-speaking habits and their
affinity for alcohol—is very disdainful of the poor and the religious, which
mostly overlap. So this story operates on two levels: of the idea that time was
destroying values, but also how the boundaries between social classes were
blurring.
The process of
gentrification, Bilquis could see, had begun.
Beyond this lamentation of the changing times, it got
increasingly hard not to roll my eyes at the romanticization of the past that
prevails throughout the book. In all the conversations I have with my elders, I
usually have very little patience for the statements which seek to show how
wonderful life was, and how horrible it is now (oh these millenials/this
internet/this technology, ruining us all). This book is a sort of summary of
all those conversations into one: a sad, whiny little complaint that stretches
over 200 pages. The only redeeming quality is that the author makes it clear
that it is our protagonist who feels this way, thus keeping it out of the
overall narrative.
“I was thinking that
soon there won’t be anyone left except us old people.”
“And our servants,”
Bilquis smiled.
“And what will become
of us?”
“Why, my dear, we’ll
rot.”
Another reason why I liked this author (or publisher,
depending upon who decided this) was the fact that not a single word was
italicized, in a book filled with mentions of bhujias and koftas and millions
of other specifically desi dishes and plants and clothes. Most books by
international publishers which are written by Pakistani writers make it a point
to italicize words that their expected audience of Western readers would not
get, as if to say, here’s something from a culture you don’t recognize, so you
don’t necessarily need to understand it. Some will even go so far as to provide
glossaries at the end of the book, long lists of words for the anglophile
reader. And while the argument of whether this is necessarily a good thing or
not can be kept for another day, in the here and now I believe it’s fine to
leave it unitalicized, and was glad to see that this book agreed with me.
Overall, this wasn’t the best thing ever. It passed my time,
and it didn’t waste it. Some of it was interesting, and a greater portion of it
was pointless. Maybe read it if you’re interested in Pakistan in the 80’s?
Hesitantly recommended.