Despite my earlier self-vaunting about knowing a thing or two about women who were legends, I had walked in here with exactly the kind of attitude I had seen so many women adopt when they first met my mother – a determination to see some mythic being, a determination so strong that my mother occasionally found herself behaving in ways entirely alien to her personality just because it seemed impolite to shatter the illusions others had about her.
Above all, this book pays homage to mothers and their right to their own lives. Honestly, given how close the whole concept is to my heart—that of mothers and the struggle to separate their lives from their children—it is remarkable to me that this book took so long to come on my radar, and instead spent months gathering dust on my shelf while I read a million other books.
Because this is a remarkable novel, no doubt about it. It demands a right for women that few books do with that level of grit: the right to keep being an individual even after they have children. And it’s not like I haven’t read novels about mothers who love their children in complex, convoluted ways. I’ve read about abandoned children and ignored children, smothered children and loved children, but I haven’t read any of those from a South Asian perspective, which makes this book so much more special to me.
“I wasn’t willing to accept that she was human. I wasn’t willing to accept that she could be broken.”
Aasmaani Inqilaab, whose ridiculous name is a part of the story itself, is the daughter of famous Pakistani activist Samina, a woman known not only for her fiery speeches and charity work but also for her love affair with a Faiz-like Pakistani poet, mostly called The Poet throughout the story to acknowledge the English moniker given by the newspapers for his English writings. Both Samina and Poet are long gone when we enter the narrative, the man dead in a vicious beating at the hands of suspect government agencies after one inflammatory poem too many, and the mother walking out of the house two years after her lover’s death and never coming back.
“Is it that you don’t want to be your mother, or that you’re afraid you’ll fail so dismally to live up to her that you won’t even try?”
We read the story from Aasmaani’s point of view a few years down the line, around the time when her mother’s best friend steps back into acting. This secondary storyline merges smoothly into Aasmaani’s mother’s past when said best friend hands over a piece of paper to Aasmaani with coded language—a code that coincidentally only Samina, the Poet, and Aasmaani could read. Unable to understand how this could be, Aasmaani spends the rest of the time in the story unearthing old rumours and acquaintances, obsessed with finding out whether the poet could actually be still alive, and whether that means her mother was alive as well.
“Political exile is more glamorous than a daughter entering adolescence.”
As always, Kamila Shamsie inextricably winds together the political with the personal. This is something she has done in the majority of her books: the theme of events at state level having repercussions in the lives of ordinary folks is one that Shamsie sticks to religiously in all her works. This is truer than ever in this particular novel, where Samina’s activism and the Poet’s poetry mean that they are routinely beaten in protests (for Samina) or imprisoned/exiled (for the Poet). For Aasmaani, this translates to a tumultuous childhood, living with her father, step-mother and step-sister but routinely carted back to her mother’s side whenever Samina can give her daughter the time of the day.
Boring? What I wouldn’t have given for some boredom in the 1980s. it was all prison and protect and exile and upheaval around me.
“Don’t do anything less than all you are capable of, and remember that history outlives you. It may not be until your grandchildren’s days that they’ll point back and say, there were sown the seeds of what we’ve now achieved.”
This was true in Kartography, one of my favourite novels by this author, and also in a bunch of her other published works, but it was only in Broken Verses that it became clear as something of a pattern. And it’s interesting partially because most stories tend to focus on the drama of the hero or heroine themselves and not on what their parents or grandparents did or did not do. Shamsie instead uses the things that happened in earlier decades as a way for our characters to react. History has weight and actions taken years ago have consequences on our children is what sums up what she is essentially trying to say in most of her novels, and while I love this, it does mean that the person from whose perspective we are reading the story becomes less interesting by comparison.
Thankfully, the complexity of the rest of the characters in the storyline do manage to save the day. This is particularly true for side characters like Rabia, Aasmaani’s step-sister. I’ll be the first to admit that I love the way Shamsie writes about women. While it is true that her characters inhabit a social level that is elitist and privileged, I find that I am willing to be more forgiving towards her rather than, say, Mira Sethi, purely because Shamsie writes better, plain and simple. Even though she writes only within the demographics that she knows, the relationships Shamsie explores between the women in her stories are lovely in their intricacies.
“She wasn’t an unbreakable creature of myth. She was entirely human, entirely breakable, and entirely extraordinary.”
In this particular novel those particular relationships also vaguely venture into romantic territory, although that never gets fully explored. Still, in a country where homophobia is rampant, it’s always fascinating to me the kind of things Pakistani authors get away with in their literature. A huge part of this must also come from the fact that these books are being published abroad, with very low actual readership within the country itself. Still, it’s always interesting to see how Pakistani authors circumnavigate the kind of thorny issues that would not have a favorable reception among the general South Asian audience.
“There is no mystery—that's the beauty of it. We are entirely explicable to each other, and yet we stay. What a miracle that is.”
Such as mental health, for example, which played a significant enough part in the plot to be worth mentioning. It’s amazing how many stories with traumatic backgrounds and character growth arcs fail to take into account mental health issues, never talking about them or at best skirting uncomfortably around the topic. Shamsie faces it head on, in a moment that feels both powerful and emotionally vulnerable for our main character, and might have been the only singular moment throughout my reading experience of this novel where I actually really liked the heroine.
We are so desperate to be explicable to ourselves, to rely on ourselves, that we need to believe a certain version of who we are even when evidence starts to mount that the version is a lie, even when the part of us which is not tamed by habit strains to break free and overwhelm the tired, repetitive creature that our character has become, mouldering at the edges.
So all in all, very good stuff, but amidst all the brazen awesomeness of her storytelling, there was one pesky detail that kept bothering me right till the very end, and that was the utterly boring romance. Aasmaani’s affair with Ed was so tedious, watching paint dry would have been better. There was absolutely nothing to explain their sudden and frankly bizarre attraction to each other. On the basis of what is Ed suddenly fascinated by her? What does he do to make her so enamoured with him? Not only does she flip between I-hate-him/I-love-him, there’s just no underlying foundation which brings them together. The fact that your parents were best friends is no basis for the way Ed becomes all ‘Oh but you’re so interesting, so fascinating, I care about you so SO much.’ Which is sad because the romance was supposed to be a hugely important part of the story. Instead the whole sub-plot serves as a weak background for the real tragedy of her mother’s whirlwind, passionate love story. Honestly, I do understand why the author set it up the way she did, because it was meant to lead to the conclusion the story was leading towards, but truly the execution was severely wanting.
I looked at him, and that thing happened between us. That fizz. Something electric. Our bodies reduced to single nerve cells and the space between us a synapse, pulsing an impulse back and forth.
If it hadn’t been for that pointless romance, I would probably have loved this story much more. Not to say that there weren’t small parts of the writing that weren’t very polished. It is true that in some scenes the characters talked in ridiculous ways, in dialogues that no one would utter in real life. Shamsie had clearly, by this time in her writing, not managed to separate her conversations from her exposition in as smooth a manner as one would expect. However, I would have been willing to forgive it all if I had cared at all for Aasmaani and Ed, two characters who played too huge a role in the story to be easily ignored.
Hence, a good book, and one I would definitely recommend for everything
else except for the chemistry between the two main characters. Read if only to have a taste of South Asian
women revealed in all their complexities.
But if a woman was a mother, Dad was simply unable to view her life in any view except as it might relate to the well-being of her child.