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| Cover Art - Winter 2023 Issue |
I really liked the idea of this story, even if I didn’t much care for the execution. The idea of being able to use only a certain number of words for a certain time period might not be the most original in terms of plot, but the possibilities of treatment are endless. And as someone who is overly-verbose both in her speaking as well as in her writing, I like having all the words at my disposal, preferably in multiple languages. So while there were certain parts of this story that I felt myself get pulled in to, ultimately it didn’t truly deliver, didn’t pull me in as much as I wanted it to.
I have learned to manage my rations allotted to me
quite reasonably now. I learned how to add meaning in my silences and pauses
around you, I learned to pace them sparingly throughout the time we were
together.
What makes it harder to get pulled in is that so much of the plot is left unclear. Our heroine is living in a world where words are restricted, and there’s someone she loves with whom she spends time in between… doing what exactly? What happened before and after? Why did the word restrictions happen? Where’s the rest of her family? What’s happening in the wider world out there? I’m usually one of those people who like to focus a lot on characterization and very little on world-building, but there has to be at least a little of it to give some weight to the story. Over here, it mostly felt like the writer had a good idea for what they wanted the characters to go through, and spent all of zero seconds thinking the concept out before starting with the story.
Mostly what that means is that the story meanders through past and present in a way that doesn’t make much sense, and leaves us feeling a distinct lack of investment in what happens. I wanted to care, even when we found out that the person the heroine loves has a dead brother, killed because he was a poet. I wanted to feel the feelings the story was trying to evoke in me, but most of me was too busy trying to understand why writing was a problem. Were written words also banned? How was the heroine reading newspapers? Was I not getting the story properly? Was there something I had missed? The dead poet made for an interesting side note, but it was such a small, mostly untouched side note that all I felt was disappointment at the missed opportunity to create a wonderful narrative.
He was a poet. Poets should have words. But they said he was disrespecting their religion. And he had to die.
I similarly loved the idea of music and singing that briefly made a cameo in the plot before once again getting whisked away into the ether of disjointed storytelling. There is a History of Sound Museum, and the heroine listens to Iqbal Bano, but beyond these vague recollections, there isn’t much, or enough, weight given to the idea of singing and how word restrictions could affect them. For years people have been playing music and listening to it, dedicating lives and careers and huge sums of money to the words that accompany symphonies of sound. So this particular plot point, rife with potential, made me interested, only for my excitement to fizzle out soon afterwards.
I remember the tune briefly, hummed by my grandparents, years before the rations, years before they burned music cassettes in piled heaps because the reigning General saw a dream about an unknown song that would cause a revolution which might disrupt his government, years before his government was removed by another General and a song was played at the former Dictator’s arrest, years before the rations and counters.
Most of the story started and ended in that same, mostly pointless way, with the bare bones of a brilliant idea not taken at all to its full capacity. I started off invested, and then got progressively more and more bored, not connecting with anything or anyone, and not particularly caring, even when horrible stuff happened to our heroine, or to other people in the story, random strangers who came and went without creating much of an effect on the narrative.
The other day, the old man Rizwan, who sold flowers at the old cemetery near my house was taken away for calling out his wife’s name repeatedly at her grave.
All in all, a story that had promise but didn’t live up to it, made worse by the random tense changes throughout the telling of it. For some unfathomable reason, the author seemed unable to decide in which tense the story should be told, which meant that past and present sometimes collided within the same sentence. This could maybe be treated as a sort of creative flair, an artistic freedom granted to experimental works of prose, but over here it mostly felt like grammatically incorrect, and made me itch to drag a red pen across huge swathes of the writing. Commas felt misplaced, and sentences didn’t stop where they should have. These were the sort of issues that a clearer editorial gaze could have easily cut out, which made the whole reading process doubly frustrating.
I glance at the photo she has in the corner behind her, under the windowsill by the counter, the light outside is turning dark blue, we are entering the blue hour again.
As an editor, I know that I am more fussy about these issues than other readers would be, and so sometimes I try to not let it get to me, but the problem with problems of tense in a narrative is that my brain glitches on them, so that I’m left wondering where I am supposed to be in the story. Have we suddenly shifted to a past tense? Is the character recalling a memory? Where in time are we supposed to be stationed at that particular scene in the story? There’s a reason why publishers make such a big deal about these things, and that’s because so much of what’s written down has to be carefully checked a million times before it reaches the eye of the readers, who are quicker to spot mistakes than most people realize.
Peas, potatoes, carrots and spring onions, I repeated the same gestures for these vegetables and purchase them.
Overall, a good idea, but it left much to be desired. I think I would love to read a full-length novel about this concept of a sparse quantity of words allowed to be used by a totalitarian government, and oddly enough I’m sure it must exist out there somewhere. So even if I was fully bored by the ending, I suppose the fact that it opened my eyes to new, interesting types of science fiction plots is something valid that came out of this reading experience.
The rations have given me time to pause, if nothing else.
Word Rations by Nazuk Iftikhar Rao was published in Issue 005 (Winter 2023) of Tasavvur, an online portal for South Asian writing. The remaining reviews for other Tasavvur stories by Pakistani authors can be found here.