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January 25, 2004
Review: Unbelievable but involving
I AM not quite sure as to what prompted me into reading Kiran Azam’s Dreams Can Come True. The lean, 82-page novel is quite ordinary looking on the outside, the storyline on the back cover was most depressive. After all, who looks forward to reading a story of a sweet thirteen-year-old suffering from brain cancer?
The author is a child herself. A ninth grader, she wrote this book when she was just twelve. Suddenly my mind raced back to another young lady who had penned a fascinating novel also at the age of eleven or twelve. Her book A Dream Come True was also published by the same publishers and it is commendable that they are giving young budding novelists a chance. Although Nayantara Noorani has not written another book after her second one, the emotionally involving Reflections, we hope that Kiran Azam would continue writing more stories and grow into a wonderful novelist.
Kiran certainly knows the first rule of storytelling: Lie, and lie beautifully. She has done just that in Dreams Can Come True. The book is written in the first person. So we meet thirteen-year-old Neha, a perfectly happy child with beauty (her eyes “are like limpid pools of molten jade!”) and brains. She has a little sister, busy and successful parents, lots and lots of friends and nice teachers. But wait, isn’t this kind of boring? Neha thinks so too when she longs for some change. She wants some adventure and some challenge, “This was way too easy. My adventurous streak made me feel like a prisoner inside. I wanted to open up, fully realize my potential... I wanted to grow...”
Sure enough, Neha’s wish is granted. Her life changes in the most dramatic way when she starts suffering from headaches, blurry vision and fainting spells. She is diagnosed with brain cancer and given little time to live.
While reading the book, I wished, countless times, Kiran Azam wouldn’t kill off her heroine so easily. In the next pages, she makes her suffer the agony of being in and out of hospitals, losing her “straight, shoulder length auburn hair” due to chemotherapy. When she starts wearing a wig, there is the trauma of a naughty boy pulling it off her head.
Enough was enough! Just when I was about to toss the book aside, my eyes fell on its title again: Dreams Can Come True. Could this story have a happy ending after all? Yes it did, and in the most bizarre ways. The final pages have a very sick and desperate child working in a sophisticated genetics lab trying to come up with a cure for cancer. She does too and I wouldn’t have believed a thing had I not really wanted to believe it. The climax too is all very exciting. You have a grownup, healthy scientist chasing a weak little cancer patient all around the lab to finish her off and steal the credit for her discovery. Thank you Kiran Azam for not letting him succeed. Thank you for writing such a weird tale. I forgive you for being so unbelievable but then you are a child with a fantastic imagination. I look forward to reading a sensible story with the same byline in the next ten years or so.
Dreams Can Come True
By Kiran Azam
Ferozsons (Pvt) Ltd, 60 Shahrah-i-Quaid-i-Azam, Lahore. Tel: (042) 630 1196-8. 277 Peshawar Road, Rawalpindi
Tel: (051) 556 3505. Mehran Heights, Main Clifton Road, Karachi. Tel: (021) 583 0467 UAN 111-62-62-62
ISBN 969-0-01828-0
83pp. Rs90
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