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August 29, 2004
REVIEWS: The sin of love
When Nadeem Aslam addresses eager audiences, he speaks of his literary characters, hauntingly, his loose black curls mopping a broad forehead, the 37-year-old Pakistani-born novelist is unable to grapple with the modern world of questions and answers, eager to retreat into his literary cocoon where he can enjoy Wamaq Saleem’s verses, removed from the glitterati of author-marketing for his second novel.
Maps for Lost Lovers spans one year in a nameless English working class town, somewhere near lush green fields, a soothing lake where seasons change with precision, a place the community call Dasht-i-Tanhaii, the desert of loneliness, where Aslam’s story traces the impact of a double murder — an honour killing — of a couple who decided to live together because they could not marry.
Aslam embarked on this novel at 26: of the 11 odd years, he spent two working in pubs and building sites, the rest compiling 100-page sketch-stories on the main characters and a year and half was spent typing the main draft. In an interview he says, “My life has been so reduced. I didn’t have a mobile phone until I’d finished my book and could afford one. Now I am trying to engage with the world — things like e-mail and the Internet. I feel like Rip Van Winkle.” If failure had hit, Aslam’s anxious siblings feared he would douse himself with depression after years of hard work: but his beautifully evocative writing, laced with luxurious pastoral metaphors has proven otherwise in a story of love.
It opens with the first snowfall of the season, where the earth is a ‘magnet’ pulling snowflakes out of the sky towards itself; as “an icicle breaks off drops like a dagger”. Overpowering in detail, languid in cadence and iridescent, you are left aching to re-read a passage because you haven’t absorbed the bewitching image. Jugnu, a lepidopterist (thus Cinnabar, Great Peacock and Large Emerald moths litter the prose) is missing with his lover, thrice-divorced Chanda, who first enters his backyard when the apple trees have not yet blossomed: she will never see the trees with their fruit because she will be dead by then, killed by her brothers, her neck broken, rumours of her pregnant fluorescent belly shining near the lakeside will cause the women to talk about the roaming ghosts of the dead lovers.
There is a lonely Shamas, the communist director of the community relations council, who at 65 “knows humans are mere shadows across the face of time, stuff to fill graves” with his devout wife Kaukab, who has alienated their three children with her zealous Islamic values, sadly aware that she “can’t seem to move without bruising anyone”. Epitomizing the working class community who are suffocating in the intimacy of their secrets, a community where the women with their limited English may talk to three whites per year, Kaukab is treated with sympathy, and humour.
“I’m from a working-class family and I’ve always lived in these places,” Aslam says. He cites nature as being the primary influence: “Once I had created this town, I knew which direction the river would flow, how the town would be mapped, it was then that I thought of the characters.” He can deal with personalities because he knows how to hate and love but insists that his novel is about the politics of the place. Contemporary in its content, it is brimming with cultural issues concerning Asian Muslims in Britain: racism, arranged marriages and Islamic divorce: ‘Talaaq, Talaaq, Talaaq’ — which can pull the rug of security from a woman’s life in a moment of marital rage.
Aslam is sensitive to the plight of women. He refers to an exorcism that leaves a rebellious girl battered to death to the aborting of female children to a paedophile cleric (he says it happened in reality in a Midlands town). A woman in one Pakistani province is killed every 38 hours, he says, and points out that each shocking incident in the book is based on a true case.
Shoppers gossip at Chanda’s parents’ grocery store over the loquats and hibiscus-flower hair oil. Here it’s a neighbourhood curse to say “May your son marry a white woman,” so when Kaukab’s daughter Mah-Jabin abandons her husband in Pakistan after two years of suffering acute physical abuse, cuts her long tresses and decides to move to America, she is outraged, wondering if she can arrange another marriage with a Muslim man.
Choking with metaphors, Aslam attributes his lyrical language to his access to Urdu literature and because “the characters are immigrants who are constantly comparing England to Pakistan, so as a writer I wanted the text to do the same thing.” They do it so much that they fail to understand their present life and situation in a country that is screaming out to them.
Despite their vulnerability, sense of failure and self-awareness, Aslam gives them voices, against a backdrop full of riveting sights, sounds, smells and colours, where Jugnu and Chanda’s house becomes “the house of Sin, the house of Death, the house of Love”, where Chanda’s veil was once captured by a twig, “as though she were being clairvoyantly prevented by the tree from advancing any further, as though the crop of fruit last year was not apples but crystal balls full of blood, predicting rage and red death”.
Aslam is a year and 100 pages into his next novel, which is set in America and the Soviet Union: asked if a Pakistani can write about Russia, he replies: “The way I taste strawberries is the same way a Russian does.” Smiling, his almond-shaped piercing eyes dance, like swirling dervishes, whirling to the frenzy that is life.
Maps for Lost Lovers
By Nadeem Aslam
Faber and Faber Ltd
ISBN 0571221807
496pp. £16.00
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